Ray Phillips <r.phillips@jkmrc.uq.edu.au> writes:

> I don't know how the SPEC values (for example) for the two machines
> compare but I'd have thought and hoped the PWS would be considerably
> faster.  Is building an alpha release of NetBSD more "difficult"
> somehow than an i386 release?

Yes. GCC does more work for an Alpha target than for a i386 target, so
even on machines that SPEC identically, the build will be slower on an
Alpha.

> I guess there wouldn't be many (any?) floating point instructions
> executed when performing this operation?

Well, compiled code on the Alpha frequently uses the FP registers as
scratch space for copying data, but no, building a release is not
something that is going to take advantage of the Alpha's relatively
good FP performance.

        - Nathan