I have a collection of servers and workstations running solaris on sparc and amd opteron. I read in a forum online that gnu octave was optimized primarily for the intel architecture chips. Is this true today with version of octave at 3.0 and above? I would like to begin using octave on my hard to do analysis but I am wondering if the performance will be enough. If in fact this true would compiling octave and using the blas and lapack optimized libraries available with the sun studio compilers address performance issues?