On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 21:44 +0200, Bartłomiej Piotrowski wrote:

Actually, why don't raise the bar higher? SSE2 has been introduced in 2001 – that's 15 years to upgrade one's hardware and given my sad experiences with computers, I find it hard to believe anyone has that old PC that happens to run Arch.

We used to advertise ourselves as optimized for modern processors. Our "i786" really should include SSE3. For the same reason I would not complain about requiring SSE4 instructions for amd64.

...

In the 2000's AMD and Intel followed different paths with extensions. Checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions and its links suggest AVX was the point where the paths became the same again. AVX was designed in 2008 , but first procesoors that supported it were launched in 2011 . My 2009 AMD opteron 2378 "Barcelona" processor advertises SSE, SSE2, 3DNow & 3DNowExt . I couldn't find specifics about 3DNowExt , but chances are big that software compiled with SSE3 , SSSE3 or SSE4 will crash on pre-2011 AMD processors. LW