Yeah, back in the 32 bit days -fomit-frame-pointer was the only optimization you could count on to really make a difference. It wasn't small either, often 10-15% speedup. No other flag on gcc would make even a full percentage difference in my testing.
The Amd64 architecture fixed the underlying problem, so this is pretty much just a holdover. I'm surprised they even enabled it by default.
The Amd64 architecture fixed the underlying problem, so this is pretty much just a holdover. I'm surprised they even enabled it by default.