The short answer is because it was broken on the G5.
Apple had separate special hand crafted libs for the G4 and G5.
This did not help with own code generated by gcc tree-ssa branch gcc4.
IBM have since fixed this in POWER6 which is great for Linux on sys p users. The G5 iMac was the...
At least sse2, 3dnowext, etc. work on AMD. Getting AltiVec (Velocity Engine in MacSpeak) to work on G5 was problematic.
Now that should generate some traffic!
(No problem at all with AltiVec on my G4. I don't own an x86 apart from an iMac. The rest are powerpc or sparc.)
