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No More Crippled Codes

As a result of the recent antitrust settlement between Intel and AMD, Intel will have to fix their compiler issues. That is, with AMD only. The Federal Trade Commission which is investigating Intel too, asks that Intel do a lot more than what's described in the AMD settlement. To cover VIA CPU's also.
Intel's compiler can produce different versions of pieces of code, with each version being optimised for a specific processor and/or instruction set (SSE2, SSE3, etc.). The system detects which CPU it's running on and chooses the optimal code path accordingly; the CPU dispatcher, as it's called.

"However, the Intel CPU dispatcher does not only check which instruction set is supported by the CPU, it also checks the vendor ID string," Fog details, "If the vendor string says 'GenuineIntel' then it uses the optimal code path. If the CPU is not from Intel then, in most cases, it will run the slowest possible version of the code, even if the CPU is fully compatible with a better version."
You can read the whole story here.

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