retard wrote:
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:17:12 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"retard" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:49:02 +0000, dsimcha wrote:
Given that Walter has indicated that 64-bit support is on the agenda
for after D2 is finished and x87 is deprecated in 64-bit mode, will we
also see SSE(2) support in DMD in the relatively near future? If so,
will it be exposed as a compiler option even when compiling in 32-bit
mode?
I've realized that this is kind of important for me since Intel
deprecated x87 on its Core 2 and Pentium 4 chips, meaning any old
school floating point code runs painfully slow compared to, say, an
AMD chip that still has a decent x87.
SSE(2) ? Don't people already use SSE 4.2 and prepare for AVX?
Yes. The ones who enjoy arbitrarily shrinking their potential user base.
Why not dynamic code path selection:
if (cpu_capabilities && SSE4_2)
run_fast_method();
else if (cpu_capabilities && SSE2)
run_medium_fast_method();
else
run_slow_method();
One could also use higher level design patterns like abstract factories
here.
The method needs to be fairly large for that to be beneficial. For
fine-grained stuff, like basic operations on 3D vectors, it doesn't work
at all. And that's one of the primary use cases for SSE.
