Maintaniner on duty wrote:

Hi,

I heard gcc-2.95.?? does not have a capability of utilizing Pentium 4's new instruction set. But gcc-3.2 does.

True, but I haven't yet tried using the march=pentium4 optimisation.

I am very much interested in speed comparison of some applications especially latex processing on Pentium 4 machines. Linux on Pentium 4 has been so miserable. For example, what I have been experiencing so far is that P4 under 2GHz is generally slower than Pentium 3 at 1GHz. Did it now change after SuSE-8.1?

This is not what I found. I tried LaTeX on a 300 page maths book I prepared for Cambridge University Press. On a 2.4 GHz machine, the entire book was built from LaTeX source in 2.8 seconds - faster than I've been able to get from any Solaris box I've used and much better than the 20 seconds on a 500 MHz Celeron. I've also tried some of my own C++ code compiled march=i686 with the old gcc and got similar results. JDL