See, that's the kind of non-definitive answer that's not very helpful.
I seem to be good at that.
I'm designing a new file format and the nature of the data is such that
there are lots of integer values in it that will need swapping, potentially
hundreds of thousands of them for a single file, so I thought I should pick
the format that's most likely to be native in the future. Some speculation
is pretty much unavoidable here.
But won't doing that for older machines create a huge performance
burden that they may not be able to handle?
Personally I don't think Steve can get away with flipping back and forth on
this one. A transition is one thing. A long term approach that mixes
processors is not likely to go over well with developers, especially smaller
developers who don't have the resources to maintain two sets of computers
for testing purposes, not to mention any additional time required to test
and debug on different processors. Just my $0.02.
Well, just wait until we hit the upcoming 64-bit transition. Although
there was no real benefit for the PPC (and some general use stuff
would run theoretically slower) AMD took the chance to fix some of
the major problems in x86 and double the registers as well. This can
give a substantial speed boost as effectively going "64-bit" means
you don't need any legacy support and thus the extra registers will
be used. Intel copied this as EMT64. However, the current batch of
Yonah chips does not appear to support this mode.
I wonder how Apple will handle universal binaries with 3-4 architectures.
--
Sincerely,
Rosyna Keller
Technical Support/Holy Knight/Always needs a hug
Unsanity: Unsane Tools for Insanely Great People
It's either this, or imagining Phil Schiller in a thong.
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