🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <228@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP> jevans@.ucalgary.ca (David Jevans) writes:
>Several articles have compared the Transputer to 68000s
>(SUN 3s) and VAX 780s.  I had got similar results when
>testing some T800s with a beta C compiler (the developer
>of which shall remain nameless).  Needless to say I was
>less than impressed.  About 2 months ago I got ahold of
>another demo board and a Logical Systems C compiler
>(from CSA).  My ray tracer, which is very cpu and
>floating point intensive, ran 25 times faster than
>with the other vendors C compiler.  The execution
>time was equal to that of a SUN 4!
>
>This just goes to show you that while hardware may be
>the same, the compiler can make all the difference.

I view this as a non-sequitur. You don't say whether the second board was
identical to the first - same clock speed and so on? I very much doubt that
the compiler has much to do with it, but it's probably the run-time support
(the floating point package, or whatever); perhaps your first version was
running with floating point emulation rather than using the hardware? Perhaps
your second version was configured to use the on-chip RAM for stack space?
Perhaps a lot of things... :-)

Disclaimer: I don't know much about transputer hardware systems, but I
have programmed transputers and know something about compilers.

>David Jevans, U of Calgary Computer Science, Calgary AB  T2N 1N4  Canada
>uucp: ...{ubc-cs,utai,alberta}!calgary!jevans

Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk    <Atlantic Ocean>!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
...while the builders of the cages sleep with bullets, bars and stone,
they do not see your road to freedom that you build with flesh and bone.