[arch-dev-public] i686 and SSE2

[Florian Pritz]

On Monday, September 19, 2016 7:34:23 PM CEST Allan McRae wrote:
> If we adopt SSE2 in any form, you will need to rebuild your entire
> system to use it.  It will be used in optimizations everywhere.

Just for the record: I also run 2 geode boxes as media players and I'd like to 
keep them running on Arch if possible, but I'll manage.

I'm not really sure why we want to even invest time in making all i686 
packages use more features. Most of our users run x86_64 already so maybe we 
should think about increasing feature support there since that will have a 
bigger impact. Having some packages use SSE is fine by me and apparently 
that's what we are doing right now. If I understood the initial mail 
correctly, webkit already uses SSE and just crashes when used on a system that 
doesn't support it. Apparently my mediaplayers don't use any software like 
that. I think that's also what Christian was referring to.

Also I guess we'll run into similar problems with x86_64 since we don't know 
if those people use early or recent CPUs and I believe we already use all 
features that were supported by early ones.

About javascript being massively slower in webkit: Is that compared to 
the SSE version or compared to the non-SSE version that has been there before?

Florian
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