[mythtv-users] Do you build mythtv from source, and why?
Raymond Wagner
raymond at wagnerrp.com
Tue Mar 29 16:42:56 UTC 2011
On 3/29/2011 10:27, Frans Grotepass wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:47:58 +1100
> Jean-Yves Avenard<jyavenard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As for compilation flags; in these days and age; I doubt you would
>> notice the difference performance wise following *tweaks* on the
>> compiler
> Is that so? The Atom that is often used in MythTV, a light weight
> processor with a rich instruction set with many extensions for
> multimedia processing should benefit by it. It is specifically in this
> day and age with more extensive instruction sets that sticking with
> just the i386 instruction set wastes the functionality.
The Atom is a piece of garbage. When Intel designed the Atom, they took
a modern processor design, and then ripped out the last 15 years of
research into branch prediction and instruction dispatch, leaving
something that is every bit as cycle efficient as the old Netburst
architecture, but half the clock rate. Those 'rich multimedia
extensions' you speak of are just SIMD units,
single-instruction-multiple-data, vector instructions that have nothing
to do with multimedia, but can merely be used with the type of
processing often used for graphics. These same vector instructions are
similarly available in every other modern processor design, meaning they
are nothing special to the Atom.
The only saving grace for the Atom is that nVidia released VDPAU for
Linux, and then paired one of their mobile chipsets to an Atom. No one
uses an Atom for MythTV, they use the nVidia 9400M. Without that
graphics processor to offload anything intensive to, the Atom would be
incapable of handling anything more than standard definition content,
even with any and all compile optimizations you could think of.
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