[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 04:03:14PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On June 26, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > > BTW. I am a SIMD man, because the world is SIMD. :-) So I am betting my
> > > future on vector-like processors coming back in fashion!!!!
> > 
> > You mean like Altivec and SSE2?  Nobody seems to be using them to full
> > potential. 
> 
>   They're largely simply not understood.  Most programmers today
> simply don't know what vector processing (or SIMD for that matter) is,
> much less understand how to effectively make use of it.  I believe
> they need to take steps to educate the developer base.  What those
> steps should be, however, I really don't know.

Apple made a good start by releasing a really slick library for using
Altivec in Objective-C.  But, the library leaves it to you to figure
out how to go from 1x4 and 4x4 matrices to other arbitrary sizes from
what I saw.  

The other thing is forcing programmers to use linear algebra enough to
be confterble would help.  At school, there are so many people who try
their hardest to pretend the field doesn't exist.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd