DivX 4 Optimized for Athlon XP: ETA ?

[ElFarto]

Does anyone know if a Athlon/XP optimized version of the divx codec is on the works and it's ETA ? I find rather irritating that the divx guys choose to optimize only for P4, it sound like the marketing guys from intel paid a visit to they offices..

[ChristianHJW]

.. DivX Networks decided to support SSE2, not solely P IV . Next AMD CPU ( code name 'hammer' ) is said to have SSE2 too ...

[Doom9]

well.. the hammer is like a year off.

anyways.. there's no ETA I know of and I tend to talk with the developers from time to time. I guess the decision to go for the P4 first has something to do with intel actively supporting developers to make these optimizations (be it with manpower or whatever). 3dnow is definitely planed but that's all I can say for the moment. And you gain quite a boost going from 4.02 to 4.11 on an athlon xp. And... not only Athlon XPs support SSE... Athlon MPs with the PR rating and Durons above 900mhz do too, as do P3s and Celerons)

[DmitryR]

Originally posted by Doom9
well.. the hammer is like a year off.



My personal opinion is that 3dnow is dead since AMD announced the SSE2 implementation in the Hammer. I recently encoded iDCT on SSE2 so believe me: 3dnow is very poor instruction set to compare with SSE2. In fact, it have not gone far from MMX. And SSE2 code is sometimes 3-4 times (!) shorter than MMX, so I think the best idea is to spend the 2002 to write SSE2 code and then use it with Hammer.

[Doom9]

ouch.. now you will have a bunch of very angry amd users coming after you. Even I still have an amd that only supports 3dnow.

but let's not forget sse1... with all the P3s, Celerons and the latest AMD chips out there it's a good candiate for optimization too.. in fact I suggested that.. but we'll just have to wait and see. And both SSE1 and 3dNow optimizations would come in handy for a much larger group of people as SSE2 at this very moment. P4s are still too expensive compared to AMDs.