[arch-dev-public] Processor Generation++

[Pierre Schmitz]

Am Montag, 17. März 2008 14:05:25 schrieb Dale Blount:
> On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 10:36 +0100, Pierre Schmitz wrote:
> > Am Montag, 17. März 2008 10:11:15 schrieb Tobias Powalowski:
> > > My opinion on this, why to desupport something which might be still
> > > used, also we all know that x86_64 is the future and therefore i don't
> > > think the benefit is worth the trouble.
> >
> > In addition to this MMX would not really boost anything. SSE would be
> > much superior. And further more: You would only notice such improvements
> > on heavy multimedia encoding stuff and such things you would not do on an
> > 10 years old computer.
>
> I believe though, that this was Simo's point.  We don't have many users
> on 10+ year old hardware, so many of our users are doing multimedia
> stuff and would benefit from MMX.  Before making any such change I'd
> take a poll on the ML, BBS, Flyspray ticket, and put a post on the
> frontpage pointing to all 3 asking for input on what kind of hardware
> people use with Arch.  More than 1 PPro casualty might be too many (i.e.
> next -Syu "bricks" their box).
>
> Dale

What I wanted to say is: How much would a modern PC benefit from MMX? mplayer 
and such do have runtime detection. And afaik MMX was not really successfull 
when introduced by intel.

So before we should change anything someone should do some benchmarks.

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