Software/Hardware interaction question.

[chuckywang]

Does a piece of software need only be compatible with the OS (and hence leave the OS to be compatible with the CPU), or does it need to be compatible with both the OS and the CPU?

My suspicion is the former.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: chuckywang
Does a piece of software need only be compatible with the OS (and hence leave the OS to be compatible with the CPU), or does it need to be compatible with both the OS and the CPU?

My suspicion is the former.

OS acts as the bridge to the hardware (drivers, etc)

One can write code that operates natively on a piece of hardware and/or embedded it in normal OS code.

That will then tie your code to a specific type of H/w that the code is supporting.

 

[statik213]

OS's try to implements something called HAL - Hardware Abstract Layer to hide the internal working of its interaction with hardware from the software that it can run.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction_layer

 

[Nothinman]

Does a piece of software need only be compatible with the OS (and hence leave the OS to be compatible with the CPU), or does it need to be compatible with both the OS and the CPU?

It has to be compatible with both. When you compile something it creates a binary file that contains instructions for the target CPU, so if you compile something on x86 Linux and copy it to sparc64 Linux it won't run. In the x86 world this is largely a moot point since all of the CPUs from AMD, Intel, Cyrix, etc all implement the same instruction set. But if you compile something with SSE and try to run it on a P5, it'll also fail since that CPU doesn't have SSE instruction support.

 

[luigi1]

The above poster has it right, I had an answer in my head but I was assuminmg windows. If its compatable with your version of windows itll run, well or poorly but it will run. outside of windows it get stickier. And the question was the CPU, it should be the GPU as thats where most probs come from today. GPU's are moving much faster than CPU's the last couppla years.