[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] i686 and SSE2

[LoneVVolf]

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