On 29/3/20 11:17 pm, Filipe Laíns wrote:
I would also like to note that rebuilding everything with forced support for AVX2 or whatever won't have much effect. Most packages do not have workloads where it would make use sense to use these CPU extensions, and as such, GCC would not use them.
That assumes we just add AVX2. Whereas, requiring a CPU supporting AVX2 would bring other optimizations that would be used. As I replied earlier, AVX2 may be going too far. But is a good starting point for discussion. If that is too far, what could we accept? SSE4.2? AVX? Surely we can do better than pure x86_64. To have a separate architecture would require automated builds, which requires being able to sign packages automatically. And we have not achieved database signing in 9 years.... I'm looking for a boost that could be achieved now. Allan