On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 01:18:53AM -0700, Rick Thomas wrote: > The altivec instructions and other optimizations speed-up significantly > certain kinds of programs on CPUs that can use them. It would be a shame to > loose the optimized versions by dropping back to the lowest common > denominator CPU architecture. Would it be possible to create and support a > sub-architecture that provided altivec optimized versions of packages?
No idea, but certainly in the past i386 did not have sub architectures for sse or mmx or anything else. There were some programs and libraries that did have optimizations when they detected such support, and I believe that is also true with powerpc already. libc does do cpu specific optimizations at runtime for strcpy and such. Any examples of programs where altivec makes a measurable improvement? -- Len Sorensen
