From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>
Date: September 13, 2007 10:06:49 AM MDT
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Universal Version
Don;
On 13-Sep-07, at 7:57 AM, Don Singer wrote:
Just wondering if anyone knew when the Universal version of Astro IIDC
will arrive?
It's going to be rolled in Astro IIDC 4, which will be Universal. It's around 1 million lines of code that have to be individually inspected and tested to ensure they have the correct endian.
I hoped it would be available in December, but there are a bunch of undocumented Apple QuickTime issues that means I can't re-use any of the 16 bit code in the Bayer Codec within Astro IIDC that I had hoped too. Apple will not add RGB48 or ARGB64 bit support in x86 native, so for x86 we read the Big Endian 16 bit PowerPC video data out of the movie (which is how it comes out of the camera) , then convert to x86, then process it and then reconvert back to Big Endian again for RGB48/ARGB64. For Astro IIDC internally I need to leave it in x86 endian so that I am not continually re-swapping the endian and wasting gobs of CPU cycles needlessly.
I strongly doubt that I will have time to convert, test and performance tune all our Altivec code to SSE3 either, just the time critical sections. Some of the Altivec code that bit/byte/nibble word swaps data on an element basis can't be ported to SSE because SSE does not support anything like that. SSE is really poor in comparison to what we had for Altivec in the G4/G5.
So my guess right now is 1st quarter of 2008.
HTH..
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.
Calgary Alberta T2R0N5
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