[Ti] A real world comparison

[Chris Olson]

On Jun 13, 2005, at 6:16 AM, ~flipper wrote:

> Is there any way to sort out which apps are more vector intensive?
>
> I'm doing a little research (on spec) for a couple guys regarding 
> stock market stuff.
>
> I'm curious about Final Cut Pro (and the HD version, and bundled 
> apps), as well as the bigtime audio engineering stuff.

All very dependent on AltiVec on PowerPC.  Of course, FCP is Apple's 
problem.  They'll either make it perform or it will quickly be labeled 
a "dog" and the userbase will mass migrate to something else.

Apple's version of GCC is optimized for vector code on PowerPC.  At 
WWDC they like to paint a rosy picture, and the picture isn't so rosy 
until we either get a different compiler or use Intel's compiler in 
place of GCC.  Otherwise porting PowerPC vector code to Intel SSE is 
easy enough to do, and the performance seems comparable on a couple 
instances I ran last night.  But Apple better eat some byte soup and 
crap a different compiler like real quick if there's going to be 
optimized universal binaries for apps that make heavy use of vector 
code.
--
Chris