Quote Originally Posted by LOE View Post
ummmm.... NO

yeah INT are probably the main recourse thats driving winamp and your web browser, but that are tasks that are fast enough already, they are not itme consuming tasks, heavy on calculations

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Each and every app that demands more power, in order to get it's job done faster, is running FP code. Encoding, decoding, audio and video processing and post processing, image editing, 3d rending, scientific simulations... and so on
Actually, the new, "demanding" apps are running SSE code, not FP code.

And don't tell me they are the same, because they are very different. FP code has been left in to essentially support old applications that rely on it. It is notoriously hard to optimize in assembly language because the instructions for it have variable lengths.

This is one of the main reasons SSE/2/3/4 were developed. They have fixed length and can perform the same mathematical calculations with instructions that are all the same size. This is why it is so much easier to optimize SSE code for speed at the assembly level - all the instructions are the same length.

And since there already is a very large installed base of SSE code, this is where K10 is going to see the biggest improvement over K8.