i was no able to reproduce the crash when running Gem compiled with sse2-support on an athlon-XP (which has NO sse2-support).
this is bad.
it shakes my believes that gcc produces code suitable for several flavours of cpu, like intels icc is able to do. (it is also good, since gcc optimizes generic code)
i guess i will have to add some flags to configure which allows you to set the level of simd-optimization (like stopping at mmx). even better would be to autodetect the cpu at configure time and use appropriate flags (which could be overruled via cmdline options)
in the meantime, just remove the "-msse2" flag (and make sure that the "-mmmx" flag stays, so you have at least _some_ benefit) from the Make.config (_after_ configure)
Ah, so this means that the ./configure --disable-SIMD stays valid and the -msse2 is to be removed in addition?
thanks P
mfa.dr. IOhannes