PPC or i386 ?

[Ray Auge]

Masterfully done.

I'd just like the put this a little more into context.

The whole crossplatformability is a big issue with any programs that are
very processing intensive. This is why it is rather difficult to get
up-to-date software like mplayer, ogle or emulators to work correctly on
ppc. In order to get the best possible performance they often use
embedded assembly language (not cross-paltform MMX for instance) to
speed things up and/or they might try to take certain processors into
account and speed up on them (like P4's) and leave any other processor
to use generic code. That's why mplayer doesn't play as well on ppc as
it does on a P4. And that is not to say that ppc does not have special
speed optimized instructions (Altivec), the developers simply did not
take it into account, yet.

Hence, these have to be re-writen in ppc optimized instructions in order
to work well. This usually only happens later, if at all. And only if
someone takes up the challenge.


On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 11:48, Norberto Quintanar wrote:
> This is one of the best explanations I've read on the whole
> programming language "issue."  Thanks!
> 
> --- Geert Janssens <snipped> wrote:
> > For completeness sake, I will elaborate a bit on this:
> > 
> > A source rpm contains the source code to a certain program. If the 
> > source code is written with platform independence in mind, then you
> > can 
> > build the program on any platform it was designed for, be it PPC of
> > x86 
> > with the right tools on each specific platform.
> > 
> > This is rather general, so let's look at it a bit more
> > specifically. 
> > Platform independance is largely dependant on the program language
> > being 
> > used for the program.
> > There are four main groups of programming languages I'll discuss
> > here:
> > - assembly language
> > - higher level languages, such as C, C++, Cobol, Fortran, ...
> > - java
> > - scripting languages
> ---snipped for bandwidth----------------------------------------------
> 
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Ray Auge <rayauge@doublebite.com> :)
---------------------------------

"Anything is more stable than Windows.  Even a relationship based purely
on sex." - Pamela Auge