| Re: Dual Core Apple "MacBook", and RSI's Mac Intel plans [message #46963 is a reply to message #46940] |
Fri, 13 January 2006 11:38   |
Karl Schultz
Messages: 341
Registered: October 1999
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Senior Member |
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On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:56:06 -0700, JD Smith wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:55:32 +0000, Ricardo Bugalho wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>> a couple of points, depending on your interest: - Mac OS X for Intel won't
>> emulate Altivec. So, if IDL makes any use of it, IDL might not run. OTOH,
>> unlike SSE, Altivec never supported double precision so it's likely IDL
>> won't use it. - If you don't care about Mac OS X and just want Apple's
>> tradicional quality in laptops, you might be able to install Linux on it.
>
> It turns out IDL does use a small bit of Altivec on a very few basic
> operations. I had thought it used none, but was corrected. So this
> means that IDL likely will *not* run under Rosetta (the new
> on-they-fly PPC->Intel translator). The main question is, does IDL
> run on a G3 processor? It certainly used to, back in the day, so it
> probably still does, which means when Rosetta tells IDL it is a G3, it
> may well fall back on some slower code and not choke.
IDL makes a run-time check to detect Altivec. So, if the emulation layer
faithfully reports no Altivec as it should, then IDL shouldn't execute
any Altivec instructions.
If this fails, one can still use the CPU command to turn off vector
processing. Also, see !CPU.
Karl
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