I agree up to a point, but this is a hobby and older kit is often in
service for long periods to keep financial cost down. Some people may also
be concerned with sustainability and environmental costs, others less so.
Two source branches would be a maintenance nightmare. It shouldn't be hard
to test for the extensions and set a flag accordingly. New code or maybe
new modes that must use AVX could then simply check the flag and pop up a
box to say CPU upgrade needed?
Anyway, getting off topic.
Alan G0TLK, sent from my mobile device
On 9 June 2021 23:13:23 Jeff Stillinger via wsjt-devel
<wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
Hi Bill,
I know this is not exactly the suggestion that you may want to consider,
but, I would feel remiss if I didn't mention it. The development team
has a difficult choice to make. I can empathize with people vs.
technology.
If you are trying to please the most people. I would suggest another
source branch. One for those with AVX and one for those without AVX.
You could get a little fancy and detect it during the configure portion
of the build and make it invisible to the end user. Each source build
then is optimized for the builders CPU.
If you are looking to push the technology forward, then it would be
using AVX and those with processors that don't support it will simply
have to upgrade. Being backwards compatible is nice to a degree, but
going back 8-10 years is excessive. We are talking Intel processors
that are over 11 years old and AMD processors that are 8 years old.
Bet nobody has a phone that is 11 years old. I would fully support and
press for moving the technology forward.
On 6/8/21 6:38 PM, Bill Somerville wrote:
Hi all WSJT-X users,
we are looking into some performance enhancements that will take
advantage of some parallel processing features of modern CPU
architectures. In order to gauge how much backwards compatibility for
older CPUs we will have to implement it would help to know who is
using such older processors. Please don't turn this thread in to a
mine is better than yours conversation, all I need to know is who or
how many of you are using the older CPU architectures. Note that this
applies to MS Windows, Intel Linux, and Intel macOS users, it is about
CPUs not operating systems.
The technology we will use is called AVX and that is present on all
Intel CPUs branded Core i3/i5/i7/i9 (circa 2010 to present), it is
also present on AMD CPUs since the Jaguar or Puma based CPU models
(some late Athlon-II CPUs, all Zen based CPUs, including Ryzen) circa
2013 to present.
Notably Intel CPUs branded Celeron, Pentium, or Atom do not support
the AVX technology.
So in summary, look up your CPU and if it **does not support AVX**
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions) then let me
know.
73
Bill
G4WJS.
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Jeff Stillinger - KB6IBB KB6IBB Laboratories Wylie, Texas - United
States http://kb6ibb-15.ham-radio-op.net/Ham-Radio/
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