[ydl-gen] Programming for speed on the PS3

[Jonathan Bartlett]

>Will the C code demand a specific IBM-supplied compiler (and if so,  
>how do I get it?), or will the gcc that comes with YDL 5 suffice?  I  
>suspect this is a basic "Cell 101" question, but I thought i'd ask ...
>
>  
>
1) IBM added all of their Cell-specific stuff into GCC, and yes, it 
ships with YDL.
2) IBM also makes their own compiler, called XLC, which is freely 
available for the Cell SPU, and it comes when you download the SDK 
straight from IBM (it is free as in beer not speech).

Determining which compiler is better depends greatly on what is being 
compiled.  In the few times when I checked it out, I found GCC did a 
_lot_ better with combining instruction scheduling and loop unrolling, 
while XLC did branch hinting much better.  Both of them were about 30% 
slower than hand-coded assembly language in the general case, and then 
only with -O3.

Jon
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