New Athlon Member

["M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@aracnet.com>]

I am a new member and the proud owner of a 1.333 Ghz Athlon Thunderbird. I
have an ASUS motherboard with a 266 MHz front-side bus and 512 MB of DDR RAM.
I have downloaded ATLAS 3.2.1 and I am currently working with ATLAS, as well as
other software. I bought the machine for computer music/DSP and general
scientific computing.

At the moment I'm testing ATLAS and some other packages with the pre-release
Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) version 3. The most recent download I have is
the 20010514 snapshot, and the Athlon build fails in GEMV, although the rest
of it appears to be working. The whole package builds successfully with the
stock Red Hat 7.1 compilers, which IIRC are 2.96.81. I'm going to spend a little
time isolating this before I file a formal bug report with GCC. I have two
questions:

1. I noticed there is a symbol definition implying a 512K L2 cache. Is this
actually used, or does the code pick up the apparent cache size and use that?

2. The configure step says it couldn't find the BLAS. I loaded everything on
the Red Hat 7.1 CDs, which includes "liblapack and "libblas". There are BLAS
libraries in "/usr/lib", and the R stat package, which also uses BLAS, builds
successfully on this machine. Is there something I need to do to get the
configure step to find the BLAS?

When I get past this build failure, I'm going to experiment with the GCC
Athlon options; there is quite a bit more Athlon support there than there is
with previous GCC versions. Meanwhile, I'm pretty impressed with what I've
seen so far -- about 1 GFLOP, with 3.5 GFLOPS from the 3DNOW code. If I ignore
all the defaults and let Atlas do all the benchmarks over on my machine, the
whole "make install" step takes about 7.5 hours -- not bad at all. The full
GCC bootstrap takes about half an hour, and their test suite takes about 45
minutes.
--
znmeb@aracnet.com (M. Edward Borasky) http://www.aracnet.com/~znmeb

Q. How do you tell when a pineapple is ready to eat?
A. It picks up its knife and fork.