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> How is offering such an option immoral? Not an expert, but if Intel were intentially crippling the performance of its compiler for AMD CPUs, i'd say that'd b
by ikurei 11y ago
> How is offering such an option immoral?
Not an expert, but if Intel were intentially crippling the performance of its compiler for AMD CPUs, i'd say that'd be inmoral. That's unfair competition.
If it's just that they didn't spend any time testing and optimizing for the competition's compiler, then... I'm not sure what to think of it, but I doubt i'd come out on the inmoral side of the argument.
EDIT: s/disloyal competition/unfair competition/g.
- golergka 11y agoHow is that unfair competition? They could do something even worse. They could just release a compiler which would actually NOT WORK on AMD processors, at all. Compare it to modern mobile development. To develop to iOS, I MUST use xcode — no one has to use Intel compiler to run on Intel's x86. And said xcode doesn't compile to similar ARM chips for Android at all!
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoIt wasn't just AMD, Intel was crippling performance on any non-Intel CPU. All x86 CPUs have an instruction, CPUID, that allows you to check for the presence of various features and instruction sets (MMX, x86-64, SSE, etc.). The standard way to generate backwards-compatible code which uses newer instructions is to check the flag, and run the version with the new feature if the flag is there, otherwise use older instructions. Intel, though, would not only check if the CPU supported a feature, but also if the CPU was made by Intel. Essentially, Intel's compiler would generate code like "if Intel, run fast, if not Intel, run slowly."