[Numpy-discussion] re: gcc 3.0 vs. 2.95.2

[Peter Soendergaard]

Hello,

I just browsed over the archives for Numpy-discussion and saw this, and
decided to sign up.

I work on the ATLAS-project http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/ and we have
had similar problems with gcc3.0 Gcc 3.0 has a completely new backend
which produces much slower floating point code on i386 machines. It is
most visible on the Athlon, but it also also shows on on P4 and PIII
machines. We havn't yet figured out if there are some optimizations that
can make this go away, but if you need performance stick with the old 2.95
release for now.

By the way, if you would like to use Atlas in NumPy (I don't know if you
do it already) I might be of some help. There is c-interfaces to the BLAS
bundled with ATLAS, supporting both row-major and column-major storage.

Cheers,

Peter.