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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Petz who wrote (100646)	3/29/2000 11:06:00 AM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572946

Petz, <I'm pretty sure that the code for SPECfp is, for some reason, written in Fortran, so its obvious why Compaq is writing an Athlon-optimized Fortran compiler.> The accents in your statement are entirely incorrect, so I feel a need to jump in. First, there is no _special_ code written for SPECfp. The whole SPECfp (and SPECint as well) is a collection of toughest computational problems from variety of scientific disciplines. Scientists prefer FORTRAN for their computational needs, for many reasons. The SPECfp is a set brushed up (for portability and benchmarkability reasons) codes from actual programs developed by various independent scientists for their own purposes. And Compaq is not writing a compiler just to win SPEC benchmarks. Compaq is an owner of former Digital compiler division. The Digital FORTRAN was and is the REAL COMPILER every other scientist used to use on high-performance Alpha workstations, unlike the Intel compilers which were designed for benchmarking only. The current Digital FORTRAN v6.1 is embedded into Microsoft Visual Studio, together with Microsoft Visual C++ and VB, shares the same Integrated Development Environment, and works on both Alpha and x86 platforms. On x86 it was heavily optimized for Pentium, Pentium Pro/II/III and somewhat for K6 platforms, but now they are apparently expanding its performance optimizations to Athlon architecture. Regards, - Ali