Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Portal Player Battery runtime vs compiler

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scharkalvin:
I recently noticed some benchmarks comparing several different arm compilers used for embedded developement.  I was shocked to see that GCC was pretty bad compared to some of the commerical tools, in fact it produced code that ran as much as an order of magnitude slower in some benchmarks.  Could this be part of the reason for poor runtime on the portal player targets?  Has anybody tried building rockbox using one of the better commerical compilers?   (probably would take a lot of editing to fix syntax differences between compilers)

The only flaw in this is the Gigabeat (also an arm cpu) that doesn't suffer as badly in runtime compared to the OF.

AlexP:
In fact the gigabeat battery life under rockbox is at least as good as the OF if not longer.

scharkalvin:
Well Toshiba might have compiled their firmware using GCC (level playing field).

GodEater:

--- Quote from: scharkalvin on November 02, 2007, 12:35:01 PM ---Has anybody tried building rockbox using one of the better commerical compilers?   (probably would take a lot of editing to fix syntax differences between compilers)

--- End quote ---

I don't believe so.

We're pretty convinced it's not the code from gcc which is the issue.

linuxstb:
Whilst we all agree that gcc can be pretty bad at generating ARM code, it's probably worse at generating code for Coldfire, and Rockbox manages longer runtimes than the original firmware on all targets.

In addition, a lot of the performance-critical code has been optimised in ARM assembler, making gcc irrelevant.

Also, Rockbox is an open source project - we simply don't want to use closed-source (and expensive) commercial compilers, for both practical and philosophical reasons.

Buthaving said that, if someone wanted to get Rockbox to build with such a compiler, I'm sure we would all be curious to know the results.

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