Subject: libfreevec benchmarks

From: Konstantinos Margaritis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:09:15 +0300

Benh suggested that I made this more known, and in particular to this list, so 
I send this mail in hope that some people might be interested. In particular, 
I ran the following benchmarks against libfreevec/glibc:

http://www.freevec.org/content/libfreevec_104_benchmarks_updated

libfreevec has reached a very stable point, where me and a couple of others 
(the OpenSuse PowerPC port developer being one) have been using it for weeks 
(personally I've been using it for months), using the LD_PRELOAD mechanism (as 
explained here: 
http://www.freevec.org/content/howto_using_libfreevec_using_ld_preload).
The OpenSuse guys even consider using it by default on the ppc port even, but 
that's not final of course.

glibc integration _might_ happen if glibc developers change their attitude (my 
mails have been mostly ignored).

Last, I've also been working on a libm rewrite, though this will take some 
time still. I've reimplemented most math functions at the algorithm level, eg. 
so far, most functions achieve 50%-200% speed increase at full IEEE754 
accuracy (mathematically proven, soon to be published online) without using 
Altivec yet, just by choosing a different approximation method (Taylor 
approximation is pretty dumb if you ask me anyway).

Regards

Konstantinos Margaritis
Codex
http://www.codex.gr