On Friday 13 January 2006 07:45, Francesco Riosa wrote: > 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.) > > speaking of manually added options to CFLAGS*, not of use flags > > The only place where mathematics count on a server is encryption ? > (notice the question mark) > Mayor part of server software use integer math that are not so enhanced > by optimizations. > The code produced is less stable, and difficult to debug, this bring to the > question: why take the risk ? actually, mmx (MultiMedia eXtensions) , sse and sse2 instructions are designed primarily for multimedia and gaming type applications, which _do_ use floating-point math, and AFAIK, encryption is going to be all-integer too (floating-point math is not perfectly precise)
And, like I said earlier, if you put a program with an sse or sse2 instruction on a PII, the program will most likely spontaneously abort when it tries to execute the unsupported instruction. -- # # electronerd, the electronerdian from electronerdia #
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