Ben Cotton wrote:
Fedora currently uses the original K8 micro-architecture (without
3DNow! and other AMD-specific parts) as the baseline for its
<code>x86_64</code> architecture. This baseline dates back to 2003
and has not been updated since. As a result, performance of Fedora is
not as good as it could be on current CPUs.
This is the price of compatibility.
This change to update the micro-architecture level for the
architecture to something more recent.
I don't see a practical benefit to requiring anything more recent than SSE2
(what we currently assume) as long as upstreams still support that baseline.
Surely a few percent of gained performance are not worth tossing out entire
generations of hardware!
we propose AVX2 as the new baseline. AVX2 support was introduced
into
CPUs from 2013 to 2015. See
[
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions#CPUs_with_AVX2
CPUs with AVX2].
This is absolutely unacceptable and would force me to look for a new
distribution. Not even my Sandy Bridge Core i7 supports AVX2, not to mention
my Core 2 Duo notebook that still runs Fedora perfectly fine right now.
Sure, the notebook is 11 years old and the desktop 8 years, but those
machines work perfectly fine and the desktop doesn't even perform that
badly. If I have to choose between replacing the computers or replacing the
distribution, my choice will be made fairly quickly.
My desktop's CPU only supports AVX 1, my notebook's CPU only up to SSSE3 (no
SSE4 nor AVX).
After preliminary discussions with CPU vendors,
And that pretty much says it all! Planned obsolescence anyone? No thanks!
Kevin Kofler