[x264-devel] Off topic: how to discover SSE2 units

[Eeri Kask]

Hello,

Despite being off topic but related, hoping to find technically
savvy people may I ask how to discover SSE2 units in intel CPUs.

In particular, how may SSE2 units does intel quad-core xeon in a
MacPro of early 2008 have?  I kind of remember hearsay telling some
intel multi-core CPUs have one SSE2 unit which is then shared among
all cores; which would mean parallel-running multi-threaded programs
utilising SSE2-instructions are serialised at that point... not so?  :-)

(I created a small test program computing pixelwise squared
differences of color images using SSE2 instructions and this program
is approx 4x faster if run using 4 threads instead of one; so I'd
like to believe but I'm not quite sure if this is a sufficient proof
of existing 4 SSE2 units...)

Feel free to joke over me about this "dumb" question,

    Eeri Kask