For my first posting on WaN I thought the new requirement for your processor to be SSE2 compliant was worth a mention.
SSE2 was introduced in 2001 by Intel with the Pentium 4 and then AMD added support for SSE2 with the introduction of their Opteron and Athlon 64 ranges of AMD64 64-bit CPUs in 2003.
AutoCAD 2010 now requires SSE2 compliance. If your machines processor is not SSE2 compliant then the install will be blocked. This also applies to Autodesk Design Review 2010.
During installation or deployment you will see that the option to install is grayed out:
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Hi,
I'm just a plain end user. I don't write software and I don't develope software, so I'd be grateful if someone can advise what SSE2 compliance really is and why 2010 needs it. I currently run 2009 no problem and have used Autocad since version 9 so I have a sort of basic understanding of the product. Guess my workstation just plain getting old because 2010 won't load and trying to find which processors, new machines, are or are not SSE2 compliant seems difficult. AMD web site is marginally better than the Intel site.
Seperate issue but what stops Autodesk say making 2011 SSE5 or SSE9 compliant etc. Do I rush out and buy a new workstation next year as well!!!
Posted by: Phil Robson | April 13, 2009 at 03:43 AM
Phil, thanks for taking the time to respond. Shaan Hurley provided a brief explanation of the SSE2 requirements here: http://tinyurl.com/c8z3hc
The SSE2 extended instruction set was introduced about 6 years ago for AMD CPUs and 8 years ago for Intel CPUs. SSE2 provides tangible performance benefits for AutoCAD 2010.
Autodesk doesn't make decisions like this lightly or arbitrarily because we understand the impact it can have on customers. In the 6-8 years (depending on the CPU) since it was introduced, we have not taken advantage of the performance benefits that SSE2 affords the software – until now. Since it took that long for us to make SSE2 a requirement, it is highly unlikely that you'll see Autodesk forcing you into a new workstation next year as well.
Posted by: Tom Stoeckel | April 13, 2009 at 06:52 AM