Performance with GCC 3.1

[Simon Waters]

Initial testing with GCC 3.1 shows a performance gain of the
order of 20% over GCC 2.96, with exactly the same options, on
building an experimental variant of GNU Chess.

Intel Celeron 300 MHz, Mandrake Linux 2.4.18.

The stripped executable is slightly smaller, but difference in
size is insignificant.

Example timings, unstripped, stripped.
GCC 3.1 Time to depth 9; 32.9 32.7
GCC 2.96 Time to depth 9; 39.9 45.5

Other timings are consistent, advanced features of 3.1 were not
used. Build of GCC 2.96 was not done from source.

 Anyone else note same?

 Simon