Re: compilation architecture
On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 14:14 -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote:
I suggest all key performance critical packages be made available in
both i386 and i686 versions. glibc and openssl already do this. Off the
top of my head, this would include Mesa, I know for a fact the majority
of Second Life runtime is actually consumed by T&L inside Mesa/DRI. From
what I understand, even Intel's latest chipsets lack hardware T&L. Makes
sense, it helps sell more multi-core Intel processors, and probably
helps consolidate power management.
915 does not have hardware vertex programs. 965 does though. 915 only
has fragment programs, which makes sense since that's the most bang for
the buck. 965 has both simply because it's a unified shader
architecture. It's not really a power management or a sales decision
either way, it's just what was easiest to build at the time.
Our Mesa builds already include 586+ assembly for many routines,
selected at runtime by processor inspection. I don't think they're
using anything newer than SSE2 yet, there might be something to be
gained from the newer ISA extensions. Patches gratefully accepted.
If you want to see if there's any benefit from an i686 Mesa build just
check it out from CVS and make local. Last time I looked the difference
was down in the noise region.
- ajax