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

[Jayesh Badwaik]

On Sunday, 18 September 2016 07:53:56 CEST Doug Newgard wrote:
> This thread is split between arch-general and arch-dev-public

Ohh, my bad. Did not properly read the headers. Thank You. 
-- 
Cheers
Jayesh Badwaik

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

[Doug Newgard]

On Sun, 18 Sep 2016 14:50:09 +0200
Jayesh Badwaik  wrote:

> On Saturday, 17 September 2016 15:10:48 CEST LoneVVolf wrote:
> > 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.
> >  >   
> 
> I did not receive the above Bartlomiej's mail from the Arch Mailing List or 
> even the thread starter. Was it a private mail? I need to know because 
> otherwise it is getting rejected by my mail provider and I need to know what? 
> 

This thread is split between arch-general and arch-dev-public

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

[Jayesh Badwaik]

On Saturday, 17 September 2016 15:10:48 CEST LoneVVolf wrote:
> 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.
>  > 

I did not receive the above Bartlomiej's mail from the Arch Mailing List or 
even the thread starter. Was it a private mail? I need to know because 
otherwise it is getting rejected by my mail provider and I need to know what? 

-- 
Cheers
Jayesh Badwaik

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

[Mauro Santos via arch-general]

I'm not sure enforcing sse3 or later for AMD64 hardware is the best
course of action.

> egrep "^model name|^flags" /proc/cpuinfo
model name  : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+
flags   : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov
pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm
3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl eagerfpu pni lahf_lm 3dnowprefetch vmmcall

This machine is still able to run Arch just fine, and has saved the day
when the laptop I used day to day broke down. As others have said, AMD
cpus might not have sse4 unless they are quite recent.

Requiring sse2 might be a reasonable cutoff, but I'm sure there will be
people still using older machines that will complain if sse2 is
mandatory, as I can reasonably see late pentium 3 machines still being
usable for office, email or light browsing applications.

-- 
Mauro Santos

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

[Martin Kühne via arch-general]

It would probably also give more arguments/hardware in need of a
retro-cpu archlinux variant/project which I'd like to see and would
help out with. Which in turn might be a better alternative for my
Geode as well.
Just my 2¢ to this.

cheers!
mar77i

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

[Martin Kühne via arch-general]

...I'm all for making arch work well for the hardware it runs well on,
and I don't think expecting SSE2 is too bleeding edge wrt hardware
constraints. There are other distros that work well on cpus that
aren't up to par with arch's needs. I started using gentoo on my
pcengines board due to already existing performance concerns for its
amd geode/i[45]86 cpu.

cheers!
mar77i

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

[Ralf Mardorf]

>On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 21:44 +0200, Bartłomiej Piotrowski wrote:
> > For the same reason I would not complain about requiring SSE4
> > instructions for amd64.

So you recommend to drop good hardware, to pollute our environment, to
waste rare earth elements and things like this?

[rocketmouse@archlinux ~]$ sudo hwinfo --cpu | head -8
01: None 00.0: 10103 CPU
  [Created at cpu.457]
  Unique ID: rdCR.j8NaKXDZtZ6
  Hardware Class: cpu
  Arch: X86-64
  Vendor: "AuthenticAMD"
  Model: 15.107.2 "AMD Athlon(tm) X2 Dual Core Processor BE-2350"
  Features: 
fpu,vme,de,pse,tsc,msr,pae,mce,cx8,apic,sep,mtrr,pge,mca,cmov,pat,pse36,clflush,mmx,fxsr,sse,sse2,ht,syscall,nx,mmxext,fxsr_opt,rdtscp,lm,3dnowext,3dnow,rep_good,nopl,extd_apicid,eagerfpu,pni,cx16,lahf_lm,cmp_legacy,svm,extapic,cr8_legacy,3dnowprefetch,vmmcall,lbrv

Re: [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