Hi Pinemarten,
These are great results...
I had not heard of this optimization, though there are several for SETI: 'crunch3r' and 'chicken of angnor' are ones I've heard of. (Beware: I haven't run SETI for a while, so my knowledge is very limited.) As you say, versions exist for almost every platform and processor feature list.
Since SETI is open source, this kind of optimization is possible, and even encouraged -- at least tolerated: many threads exist on the SETI boards anyhow. And obviously, a near threefold improvement in speed is not only good for the user, but increases the scientific throughput as well.
Use of such apps does require a bit more hands-on: if I understand right, a new multi-beam SETI app (including astropulse) will be ready "soon," and when it is pushed out, neither it nor the older optimized app will get work unless the project folder is edited. Of course optimized apps will no doubt appear for multi-beam in short order...
Hopefully some other BAUT SETI team members can comment on what runs best for them?
Coupla things:
This is only for the SETI science app, and is not a replacement for the main BOINC application (as you noted in your last post). So-called 'optimized' BOINC clients are unnecessary, since the manager and core client do no crunching. Such optimized clients' (only) purpose is to enable falsely inflated credit claims, and so are cheating, IMO.
I think there may be one or two other projects that are open source, but most (all?) of the other official ones are not, and so optimized apps are frowned upon, mostly because the science projects need a total 'chain of custody' of what happens to their WUs to convince journals that their results are worthy of publication. (This arose a while back with Einstein: see the first posts in this thread with the name "akosf"
)
So if anyone finds an optimized app for a project other than SETI, I urge rhem to visit the project's message board first and check it out; if the admins approve of the particular version you want to use, then of course you can go for it.