RFC: Primary architecture promotion requirements

[Jon Ciesla]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Brendan Conoboy wrote:
>> Our current build systems can turn GCC 4.7 around in about 24 hours.
>> The enterprise hardware we anticipate using will take that down to about
>> 12 hours.  If speed of build hardware is a consideration, where do you
>> draw the line?
>
> IMHO, at MOST 50% longer (factor 1.5) build time, and that's already being
> nice. You're off by a factor of 4!
>
>> No secondary arch is going to get to the speed of x86_64 in the
>> foreseeable future, so it's effectively a way to keep PA an exclusive x86
>> club.
>
> That's exactly why we should stick with only x86 as primary architecture(s)
> in the foreseeable future.

Only if you assume that high clock speed workloads are the only
important workloads.  For highly parallellizable tasks, an ARM system
with tons of slower cores is a powerhouse.  Think a db server serving
huge numbers of queries.

-J

>> I think the real question is, for the developers of on devel-list, how
>> will longer builds for one arch than another affect your workflow?  If
>> builds on two architectures start at the same time, but one takes longer
>> to finish than the other, how will that impact you?  Right now you'll
>> still be able to see and use the results of the faster build before the
>> slower build completes, so are you materially impacted?
>
> See the other replies: chain builds, updates, platform-specific errors,
> build results. A lot of things depend on the builds to actually complete.
>
>        Kevin Kofler
>
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