[arch-dev-public] i686 and SSE2

[Gaetan Bisson]

[2016-09-19 20:57:01 +0200] Balló György via arch-dev-public:
> 2016-09-19 15:34 GMT+02:00 Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:
> >
> > If we limit our choice based on your CPU, then we need to limit based on
> > the other CPU mentioned in this thread.
> >
> > That should not be a consideration at all. What we need to do is think
> > about what make our distribution worthy of being a distribution.
> > Original the selling points were rolling release, vanilla packages and
> > optimised binaries.  We have lost the latter.  Do we want to get it back?
> >
> 
> 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!

And I vote to put you in charge of the legacy platforms so the rest of
us can focus on building software that uses more than half of the
transistors >90% of us own. Besides, you'll do a much better job at it
than me, given it's been nearly five years I last tested an i686 binary.

So I say we create a new architecture that includes all extensions
available on >90% of currently available hardware, make that our primary
architecture, and let people interested in legacy platforms figure out
the rest of the plan.

Cheers.

-- 
Gaetan