[rescue] Perverse Question

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 08:15:53PM +0200, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 June 2003 15:01, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> > Also, many MP3 programs use hand optimized intel assembly (or they used
> > to back when I was doing Mp3s on a 486).  It might be that such a thing
> > is needed to make the sparcs work well.  Finally, it might be that Intel
> > has an instruction that helps that sparcs don't.
> 
> They do, but not an 486 :-)
> 
> Think mmx...

Oh for crying out loud.  There have been assembly optimized MP3 decoders
for a lot longer than there have been MMX chips.  An old one free for
non-commercial use that comes to mind is amp (which was once used as the
decoding engine for winamp, and also was used for numerous command line
programs). 

There have also been realtime mp3 decoders for lots of older, low clock
rate Motorola platforms, like the Amiga, the Next machines, and probably
Mac OS.