As the perpetrator of the aforementioned perl, we have a standard set of perl binaries across each os/arch, and as the lowest spec machine we have in service is a PII everything still gets -march=pentium2.
The -ffast-math was probably a little over enthusiastic. Amusingly enough checking an alpha box shows it gets compiled with -mieee which ensure it has (slower) IEE 754 compliant behaviour, and so does not show this up.
Needless to say our perl binaries are now !-ffast-math ...