of RAM, but only ask for a paltry 80GB 7200 disk? Either you have no clue what you're doing, or you're trying to scam people into buying your new gaming box for you. Either way, I certainly hope nobody gives you any money for that thing. *snicker*
People who grew up using PC's usually think SCSI disks are a big waste
of money. My experience is that they're 2-3x faster for doing compiles. If I had a little
money to spend on building a compile system, I'd seriously consider getting a few
9GB SCSI drives off ebay and using them for a temp directory to do compiles on.
He's not the only one that believes compiler optimizations have an effect at runtime (if he was, Gentoo wouldn't exist).
People who've tested it have observed that Gentoo is slower than most Linux distributions, in particular, Red Hat.
Now that he's done the hard part of rebuilding the distro, and is providing it to everyone at his cost, hopefully users of his packages will submit quantitative and qualitative benchmarks of their favorite components.
I'd really like to see what difference the Intel compiler makes.
Another interesting question is what to do on AMD64. We know that some things run faster in 32-bvbit mode and others run faster in 64-bit mode. (RAM use is different too, which has knock-on effects on performance.)
Solaris (both for SPARC and x86) ships with a 32-bit userspace and both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels; this has the nice effect that you can install Solaris 10 on any x86 box with one set of disks. I think this is a good decision for SPARC (Debian does this for SPARC) but it's probably not so good on x86, which benefits from the extra registers in x86-64.
Still, there might be some people who'd like an x86-64 kernel with a 32-bit userspace (it would work like a Xeon box with PAE; a good setup for a mod_perl web server with >4G of RAM.) For top performance, one could imagine shipping a 32-bit or 64-bit binary depending on what's fastest for a particular app.
