------- Comment #6 from t dot artem at mailcity dot com 2009-04-18 08:18 ------- Many Linux distros compile binaries for a common lowest denominator so that you could run a distro on very old computers and CPUs - their developers in most cases choose -march=i686 or -march=i586.
I compile binaries which I have to run on very old computers like Pentium 2, that's why I chose -march=pentium2 in the first place. Let's go back to the results: ________________________________________________________ -march=i386 -O2 -pipe -ftree-vectorize unrar-424 size: 169384 time: 1m34.372s unrar-440 size: 175836 time: 1m32.014s Without CPU optimizations a binary produced by GCC 4.4.0 is larger but a bit faster. ________________________________________________________ -march=native -O2 -pipe -ftree-vectorize unrar-424 size: 180488 time: 1m17.608s unrar-440 size: 188348 time: 1m27.211s With native CPU optimizations a binary produced by GCC 4.4.0 is again larger but noticeably slower. ________________________________________________________ Pentium2 results have been already posted. This is the second major release of GCC which produces subpar results ... -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=35671
