[2016-09-19 20:57:01 +0200] Balló György via arch-dev-public:
2016-09-19 15:34 GMT+02:00 Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org>:
If we limit our choice based on your CPU, then we need to limit based on the other CPU mentioned in this thread.
That should not be a consideration at all. What we need to do is think about what make our distribution worthy of being a distribution. Original the selling points were rolling release, vanilla packages and optimised binaries. We have lost the latter. Do we want to get it back?
Another option could be to keep i686 and x86_64 as is, and introduce new architectures with automatically built optimised packages for i686 + SSE2 or SSE3, and for x86_64 + SSE4.2 or AVX. This is something similar to your option #4, but keeps the compatibility with all existing systems.
Yes! And I vote to put you in charge of the legacy platforms so the rest of us can focus on building software that uses more than half of the transistors >90% of us own. Besides, you'll do a much better job at it than me, given it's been nearly five years I last tested an i686 binary. So I say we create a new architecture that includes all extensions available on >90% of currently available hardware, make that our primary architecture, and let people interested in legacy platforms figure out the rest of the plan. Cheers. -- Gaetan