Much dis­cus­sion spawned from Google Chrome bug #9007. The prob­lem is actu­allty quite sim­ple: Chrome depends on SSE2 instruc­tions and so, when run on proces­sors which do not sup­port such exten­sion, will crash cry­ing ‘Ille­gal instruc­tion’ . This arcane look­ing mes­sage sim­ply means: “Come on my friend, go buy a new computer.”

To under­stand my opin­ion, let me talk a bit about the SSE fam­ily of extensions.

MMX/SSE intro­duced in main­stream com­put­ing the SIMD com­pu­ta­tional model. SIMD means ‘Sin­gle Instruc­tion Mul­ti­ple Data’, so for each instruc­tion the same com­pu­ta­tion is exe­cuted over sev­eral indipen­dent data. This kind of instruc­tions are extremely use­ful in  math­e­mat­ics and mul­ti­me­dia appli­ca­tions. I don’t think SSE can be right­fully called an exten­sion. It’s actu­ally a nec­es­sary fea­ture which was miss­ing in the early Intel desings. SSE2 was intro­duced back in 2001. And it’s cur­rently sup­ported on every mod­ern proces­sor, from Atoms to bleed­ing edge quad core Xeons. Keep in mind that by using SIMD instruc­tions it is pos­si­ble to speedup the code by a fac­tor of 4 or 8. And this could make the dif­fer­ence between a real­time and an offline application.

I really think there is no rea­son for Google devel­op­ers to waste time and resource to sup­port obso­les­cent machines. Good code should be eff­i­cent in terms of proces­sor time, power con­sump­tion and mem­ory allo­ca­tion. To obtain such goals it is often nec­es­sary to exploit new features.

This con­sid­er­a­tion is also the foun­da­tion of the lightspark project design. I’m mak­ing use of every fea­ture a mod­ern plat­form offers, such as heavy mul­ti­thread­ing sup­port, mul­ti­le­dia exten­sions and pro­gram­ma­ble graphic cards. All of this to obtain a soft­ware which is fast and lean on resources, even on lim­ited plat­form such as Mobile Inter­net Deviced and sub-notebooks.