Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNOW
From: Steve Harris (S.W.Harris_AT_ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 18 2002 - 17:50:04 EET
On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 04:30:57 +0100, Frank Neumann wrote:
> I also think the plugin is the one who has to determine what exact CPU
> type it's running on and whether or not to activate optimized functions
> for MMX/SSE/3Dnow/AltiVec/whatever.
> Disadvantages (harmless, IMHO):
You've all forgotten one, sane people don't had generate SIMD
instructions, they let a vectorising compiler do it for them, and the
compiler doesn't understand LADSPA, so won't know where to put the
conditionals.
Also, its not that simple. You need to support given instruction sets, and
combinations of them - which turns out to be a lot of possible run()
functions.
Vectorising compilers *do* have a multi format mode, where they put blocks
of code for given instruction sets. I've tried to use this, but I'm not
quite sure what the mechanism is. I don't thing gcc v2 supports it so you
would have to rebuild all your hosts under a compiler (+ lib elf?) that
understands multi-format dynamically loaded binaries to make this work.
- Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Mon Feb 18 2002 - 17:40:31 EET