[Openmcl-devel] Hardware requirements

[Gary Byers]

It's probably complaining about the lack of SSE2.  (Yes, it'd
be nice if it told you exactly what required features were missing.)
Most (but certainly not all) x86 CPUs sold in the last several
years offer SSE2 support, but since there are exceptions we should
mention this requirement.  (One notable SSE2-less chip that's
used in new hardware is the AMD Geode, which is used in the OLPC.)

CCL just uses SSE2 hardware for scalar floating-point arithmetic, and
it -might- be possible/practical to emulate the handful (maybe two
handfuls ...) of SSE2 instructions that it actually uses.  Getting
all of the hard parts (rounding, exceptions, ...) right is probably
a lot of work; getting enough right so that it'd at least run and
do incidental floating-point and get something close to the right
answer when it does is ... well, it's probably still a lot of work,
but might be practical and useful.

I don't know how likely that (emulation) is to happen or how soon
it'd happen if it did, but it seems more attractive than it would
be to have to support two binary-incompatible versions (SSE2 and x87)
for every ia32 platform.

In the meantime - we should add something to the front page
of the website that clarifies this requirement; sorry that it
wasn't there.

On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Marko KociÄ~G wrote:

> What are hardware requirements for ccl?

I tried svn version on both win xp and linux on my laptop, and in both
cases I get "this processor does not support required features"
message when I try to start the program.

I have old Athlon XP 2400 processor. Would it be possible to build it
some other way, or there is no chance to run it on this machine.

Thanks,
Marko Kocić
_______________________________________________
Openmcl-devel mailing list
Openmcl-devel at clozure.com
http://clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel