interesting Athlon/P4 discussion from FreeBSD-Q-l

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, May 11, 2001 at 08:34:14AM -0700, Jeremiah Gowdy wrote:

> Optimizing current 32bit applications
> especially for the P4 and its RDRAM is nonsensical.

It is?

There are 2 issues: SSE2 instructions, and coping with wider cache
lines.

SSE2 instructions will be in AMD 64-bit cores, and "optimizing" for
SSE2 isn't so hard: get a compiler that supports it well. A few people
write assembler these days, but they generally know when they're
wasting their time.

Cache lines have been getting longer for decades, and will get longer
in the future.

So where's the wasted effort?

-- g