“CPUs are optimized for video games”

Re:“CPUs are optimized for video games” by andrioni on Thursday August 11, 2016 @06:52AM (#12267227)

Given that games tend to be deployed on a wide range of computers, it's hard for them to use newer x86 extensions (e.g. AVX), while most scientific computing applications tend to be compiled for a specific machine. To get to see the larger improvements, you must use the newer instructions and registers, like you can see in BLAS benchmarks[1].

[1]: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/openblas/fundraiser

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Re:“CPUs are optimized for video games” by daemin on Thursday August 11, 2016 @08:06AM (#12267505)

Yep, at my old job we still had to support Windows XP 32 bit for the game client (internal tools were Windows 7 64 bit) as so many people were still playing on systems. I don't remember if we could use SSE2 or what the minimum was in that regard.

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Re:“CPUs are optimized for video games” by alfalfasprout on Thursday August 11, 2016 @05:48PM (#12271833)

Some compilers support multiple codepaths depending on the supported instruction set. Intel's C++ compiler makes this easy, for instance.

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