Feature changed by: Robert Davies (robopensuse) Feature #310987, revision 2 Title: Add Intel Atom as a specific architecture openSUSE Distribution: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Jiri Dluhos (jdluhos) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Atom processors, currently very popular in lightweight devices, behave very differently from common Intel/AMD processors; although they can execute code optimized for common x86 or x86-64, they don't run it much efficiently. Because they are not that fast, every cycle counts. I believe it would be useful to consider them a separate sub- architecture that deserves its own set of compilation options. + Discussion: + #1: Robert Davies (robopensuse) (2010-12-19 18:04:57) + Are there any real world application benchmark figures to show the + benefit of such an optimisation? My openSUSE experiments with old + machines, showed KDE4 to be useable even on a dual 450 Mhz with 512MB + RAM, but poor with a faster CPU and 256 MB RAM. + With Google I found a 21% floating point boost on Sci Tech, out of + using the most modern SSE instructions, but that likely applies + similarly to other modern CPUs (not just Atom sub-arch). + FWIW I am somewhat skeptical of compile optimisations making large + enough difference to be worthwhile for a couple of reasons. + Firstly, the Atom's architecture is simple (deliberately), rather than + out of order execution and pre-fetch avoiding memory stalls, it uses HT + to have the CPU do useful work on memory stalls; which means to + maximise CPU throughput you need multiple threads or processes running. + Secondly, over time there's been numerous "Compile Optiomised" distro's + eg) Revhat, and older distro's were slow to move to pentium or even + i686 code. The people who developed fit pc, orginally used Gento + optimised for AMD Geode (performance reasons cited), but dropped that + in favour of Ubuntu, which they have stuck wiith on fit pc2 which uses + an Atom CPU. Basically they have sacrificed compile options in favour + of a generic, more popular distribution. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/310987