alan@cogswell.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Alan S. Mazer) (07/12/90)
Thank you to the people who responded to my i860 compilers posting. I have not quoted actual replies since some of the people who responded may not want what they said quoted and attributed in public :-). There appear to be four compilers out there: 1. The "default" Intel compiler developed by Green Hills software. 2. The MetaWare compiler. 3. A GNU C compiler. 4. The one from The Portland Group. The Green Hills compiler is available now, but is, according to everyone who mentioned it, horrible. People around here who have used it have said that their code on the i860 runs about as quickly as on the 68030. Hardly conclusive, but a data point. (I don't know what algorithms they were running.) The MetaWare compiler works, but is not smart enough to get anywhere near peak performance out of the chip. One MetaWare user who replied suggested assembly language if you want to get even half the advertised speed. All I heard about the GNU C compiler is that it exists. I don't know if it's available. It does not make real use of the architecture, but it does generate correct code and perform normal optimizations. The Portland Group is Intel's newest friend. This compiler does make use of i860 pipelining, but it's a new offering and the literature is a little vague. Perhaps all the interesting information is proprietary. The compiler itself is reportedly available now, and the assembler and linker will be available "in 10 days". One person speculated that ultimate performance using this compiler might be around 10-20 Mflops. I think we'll wait until someone shows us a board/compiler combination that works reasonably on our algorithms. CSPI and The Portland Group are getting together, so that might not be too long. -- Alan # <this space available> ..!ames!elroy!alan alan@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov