On 1/12/06, John Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thursday 12 January 2006 18:45, Tom Smith wrote: > > Well, if they're /not/ mutually exclusive, another question that comes > > up is... > > > > If a program is compiled with sse or sse2 support on a Pentium II, will > > the program run slower than it otherwise would? (Some of the programs I > > have are compiled and then distributed to servers with different > > CPUs--P-IIs and P-IVs, mainly.) > > > > If a program uses an instruction that the processor doesn't support, the > program will be sent SIGILL, the default action of which is to terminate > immediately.
Are you absolutely positive of that? I *thought* (would have thought) compilers these days would compile in conditional use of such instructions? That way if large blocks could benefit from these new instructions, they would use them, otherwise fall back to a common set of instructions. Of course this wouldn't be very beneficial for small sections of code. I've been wondering about this for quite some time though, but never bothered to investigate. > -- > # > # electronerd, the electronerdian from electronerdia > # > > > -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
