[ILUG] Advice much appreciated.

[Paul Jakma]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Ronan Cunniffe wrote:

> Yeah, I know.  What I meant was that every app has a built in 
> assumption about roughly how much RAM is going to be available. 
> Not a lot of point making a 64-bit space available to an app with a 
> 32-bit mindset.

Yes.

> As for SIMD, the sad thing is that outside video codec authors, 
> just about nobody takes advantage of this stuff.  How many people 
> on ILUG looked at the Cell architecture and went "yeah, I got to 
> get me some of those pipelines!"?

Well SIMD uses outside of graphics are not obvious.

> (Confession: I have studied various technical bits on what SSE can 
> do, discussed Altivec with one of my users who had a G4, found some 
> accelerated libraries, and have sketched out a few designs for 
> pumping stuff through. Actual working code? No.  And my other 
> users?  Mostly using f77... )

I've not studied SIMD extensions, but i've noticed GCC now has 
builtins to take advantage of SIMD, if available. Still hard to think 
of uses for it though.

> (I come to realise, of course, that stuff like strcmp() could be 
> accelerated, and all you require is an appropriate glibc.  Is there 
> a glibc-for-mmx, or only glibc-for-386?)

There is, least Fedora installs glibc i686.

> Regards,
>
> Ronan

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
Elevators smell different to midgets.