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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: RDM who wrote (74962)	10/11/1999 6:15:00 AM
From: Haim Barad	Read Replies (1) of 1573727

Agreed. I do know first hand that AMD engineers do participate in optimizations for other software vendors. Just as with Intel processors, AMD processors can also benefit from proper optimizations. The only drawback the Athelon suffers in this area is the extent of developer support for the Athelon. Leave aside synthetic benchmarks for the moment... what environment is offered for software developers regarding Athelon: 1. Typical scenario - develop a generic program (optimized in a generic way - that's a loose statement) in a high level language. Runs on all x86 processors. Optimized, but not too agressively... 2. Processor specific optimizations - for MMX, you can use the Intel C/C++ compiler and generate MMX code for just about all x86 processors (only some really old machines don't support MMX - and you can still have the non-MMX path generated for you). This seems like a win... 3. Processor specific optimizations for FP - here you have 2 paths (Intel's SSE and AMD's 3DNOW). With SSE, you can still program in C/C++ (as a plug-in into the Microsoft programming environment). It covers a huge market (and you can still generate non-SSE code from the same codebase). For 3DNOW, you would have to resort to assembly and that's for a smaller market. I'm not knocking AMD's developer support. Considering the resources that AMD has (and the company's size), I really admire the accomplishments that they've done. However, optimizations for key software developers is just another support area that Intel can provide in a superior fashion and that shouldn't be overlooked. Haim

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