Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> On 3/15/2009 5:37 PM, dkanter wrote:
> > I'm benchmarking a system and if I use some custom compiled results, not only
> > does that add a lot of work to my plate (since I have no clue what condition
> > the source code is in), but it also makes my results much more difficult to
> > reproduce (and I'd need to install yet another set of tools on the test system).
>
> Fair enough.  Just out of curiosity, is there a reason you can't use the
> 32 bit builds?  They run just fine under Vista x64, and should be OK
> under XP if that's what you're using.
>
> --
> ...Chambers
> www.pacificwebguy.com

There seem to be quite a few questions, and I'll respond to them all at once.

RE: 32b v. 64b from Chambers

I'll be using Windows Server 2008 (64).  The problem with 32 bit binaries is
that they are fairly different than 32 bit ones (e.g. registers) and tend to
de-emphasize the pressure on the caches and TLBs.  When you use a 64 bit app,
you get 2x the registers, but all your pointers are 64 bits instead of 32b...so
your caches are effectively smaller.  It's just part and parcel of using x86 and
I

Good question though.

RE: Compiling from Clipka and Jim Henderson

I'm assuming that the 3.7 beta 30 was available online at some point (i.e. there
was an official beta) but taken down at the beginning of March.  If there was no
official beta 30, then that is, as you pointed out an entirely different can of
worms.  The whole goal of this exercise is for me to get a *modern* and
*official* beta for 64 bit Windows (and an older official beta counts, as long
as it's not *too old*).

That's the main reason why I don't want to try and compile the source code.  I
like things to be readily reproducible.  It's quite enough to be running with
pre-release hardware, there's no need for more uncertainty and complexity.

And yes Jim, I'm not afraid to admit that some small part of this is that I'd
rather not get my hands dirty with the POV-Ray codebase.  That's really a 2nd
or 3rd order motivation next to the issue of reproducibility, but I'm not
afraid to admit I'm lazy.

My goal is not to work on POV-Ray.  I currently use POV-Ray to measure
performance for systems and I think that it serves POV-Ray users both by
setting performance expectations and publicity of POV-Ray.

So if someone can help me that'd be great.  Has anyone perhaps downloaded 3.7
beta 30 for Win64?  Could you share the files or email them to me?  Or maybe
one of the contributors can go back through and grab beta 30 for me.

David

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