My brand new pointless obsession

The press is loud with performance comparisons of iMac G5 and iMac Intel systems, generally showing a mixed picture with an average advantage being on Intel's part. I was wondering how much compiler optimizations contribute to the performance differences. I mean, stock PPC binaries for commercial apps and even Mac OS X clearly can't be fully optimized for G5 given that they need to run on G3 and G4 processors as well.

Looking at default XCode settings for "Cocoa Application" project template, it defaults to instruction scheduling optimization for G4, not G5, although you can switch it to G5 (that equals -mtune=970 in GCC, I assume). In XCode, the GCC switch for enabling G5 specific instructions isn't even easily accessible! You need to rewrite the architecture string from the generic "ppc" to "ppc970", and sneak in the -mcpu=970 in the "Other C flags" setting, all manually -- XCode GUI won't assist you in any of this. Then again, probably no commercial software out there utilizes these settings in order for their software to be able to run on a pre-G5 CPU as well.

So, I'm currently obsessed with the following question: is it possible to build "Universal binaries" that carry not only two code versions - generic PPC and Intel, but three of them: generic PCC, PPC970, and Intel. I verified that XCode has no problems building the code if I modify the architecture setting to "ppc ppc970 i386". I could confirm that the generated executable indeed has these three platforms in it. However, the code was rather trivial, and - except for few debug symbols - the generic PPC and the G5 code was identical.

So, my current challenge is to create an executable that hosts PPC and PPC970 architecture code (as a matter of fact, Intel is pretty much irrelevant for this experiment), have the PPC970 code be fully optimized for G5, and have Mac OS X load it instead of generic PPC code on a G5 CPU.

Of course, I have very limited time resources to spend on this newly acquired "hobby" since this has nothing to do with things I do for a living, meaning I get to devote time to it only when I manage to sneak away from family for half hours on evenings. It's however a good vector for getting myself acquainted with generic hacking of this new OS platform. I really need a bit of an intellectual change of air, as I've been too Java focused for the last 7 years.