[fpc-devel] what fpc is good for?

[Florian Klaempfl]

Marco van de Voort schrieb:
>> Op Sat, 12 May 2007, schreef Marco van de Voort:
>>> P.s. I also don't get the "64-bit" gaming speed remark. What does a game do
>>> with 64-bit? Load 4 GB of textures on startup?
>> Games will be among the first end user applications that really need > 
>> 4GB. Commercial games currently released sometimes need 2 GB, it is a 
>> matter of time until it increases beyond 3GB, which is the limit for 
>> 32-bit systems.
>>
>> However, here the point is more moot than anywhere else, who cares about a 
>> few mb of exe for a game that requires gigabytes of memory and is often 
>> shipped on a 9GB dvd?! :)
>>
>> And needless, to say, FPC is very well prepared for 64-bit.
> 
> One of the things I sometimes wonder about too is how far optimizations are,
> most notably on non-x86 (and that includes _64).  Maybe make a wiki page out
> of it (implemented and to-implement?)

FPC as well as gcc are worse on non x86 architectures, however, fpc
performs usually better in relation.

> 
> Also instruction scheduling remains important, because in this weeks
> (german) C'T I saw Intel is also preparing embedded in-order x86 CPU's. (and
> at work I use C7's).

The problem of instruction scheduling is that it is really CPU specific.
 That's one of the reasons why the P4 lost performance wise: Athlon and
Core/Pentium M perform well with blended code, P4 didn't.