Am Mon, 19 Sep 2016 23:30:35 +0200 schrieb Sven-Hendrik Haase <sh@lutzhaase.com>:
This would probably be a good time to get a fully automated building setup going. We certainly have the hardware for it now.
+1
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!
If we want to limit our offer to two binary architectures I'm for x86_64 maybe with SSE3 enabled (kicks out oldest Athlon XPs) and keep i686 with least features needed for full compatibility. I could even live with i586 for fallback. Though I'd prefer to fully drop 32bit and rather leave it up to the community if they want to keep it alive any longer. -Andy