amd64 bit chips

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Monday, October 17, 2005 11:01 PM -0400 Ed Hill <ed at eh3.com> wrote:

> Do you have to write the hardware-detection code in C or assembly?  I
> ask because one way to solve the hardware-detection problem is to ship
> two or more binaries that have each been optimized/tuned for different
> processors or processor capabilities (eg. multi-processor, SSE2, SSE3,
> etc.).  When the user runs the program, he/she calls a shell script (eg.
> bash) that determines what sort of hardware and OS support are present
> and then selects and runs the best binary for that machine.  I've seen
> many applications that use this shell-script-wrapper approach and it can
> work in a graceful and user-friendly fashion.

I can safely ship separate binaries for 32 and 64 bit, but I'd like to 
avoid splitting it out further than that. (The project is a free game based 
on a commercial engine. <http://renwerx.com/>) I haven't yet looked closely 
at what's done with the CPU identification to see how much it selects code 
based on the information.

> And I've yet to encounter the pointer serialization problem that you
> describe (luckily, all my C++ objects can be serialized without use of
> pointers).

In this case, the serialization can be performance-sensitive, as some 
objects need to be shipped from a game server to a game client. And I 
expect mixed 32 and 64 bit combinations of clients and servers, so I can't 
just change the object definitions. Plus, some data files generated by 
separate tools rely on the existing layout. Fun.