[arch-dev-public] i686 and SSE2

[Sven-Hendrik Haase]

This would probably be a good time to get a fully automated building
setup going. We certainly have the hardware for it now.

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 11:12 PM, Gaetan Bisson <bisson at archlinux.org> wrote:
> [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