Except MacOS X ships fat binaries for multiple CPU architectures and uses a kern...

rbanffy · on Oct 21, 2013

Shipping fat binaries with different versions for every different Atom/Core/Xeon/FX/Phenom/Opteron Intel/AMD/Nvidia + chipset glue combination would be quite a feat.

This could go well beyond what compiling every package for your specific machine can do.

Tloewald · on Oct 22, 2013

Openstep supported quad fat binaries iirc, supporting x86, sparc, mips, and I think pa-risc. Gotta say the NeXT software architecture has aged well.

rbanffy · on Oct 22, 2013

That's not what I was talking about. I said that, if all you support is a specific Intel Atom processor, you can tweak your kernel to support every bit of energy-saving performance-enhancing silicon in there.

Shipping fat binaries is not new. I remember them (not very fondly) from the MacOS 7/PPC days.