Retire a package from Fedora i686 (not x86_64)

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat Nov 7 18:01:57 UTC 2015


Reindl Harald wrote:
> well, who's to say that we stay forever on a level of CPU
> feature-support while there are instruction sets available for a whole
> decade which improve performance, save power in case you need fewer
> instructions doing the same work?
> 
> not that i say Fedora should go ahead and build with -mavx but a
> discussion about SSE3 in 2015 is really odd

Sorry, but hardware simply does not get replaced instantly. This is a matter 
of both:
* cost – hardware is not free (as in beer),
* ecology – there are huge landfills in China, India and Africa full of
            electronic trash from Europe and the USA; that gets mined for
            recyclable materials in an extremely polluting way that not only
            ruins the environment, but also damages the health of the people
            doing the mining (and the most dangerous materials are handled
            by children). Materials used for electronic components are
            precious, someone has to recycle them or they would run out
            pretty soon.

As a developer who writes mathematical software for a living, I'd love being 
able to require AVX-512 right now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 – 
finally a way to specify the rounding mode per operation 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EVEX_prefix) rather than through the 
extremely expensive stateful fesetround operations that reset the whole 
prefetch queue, interval arithmetic should become MUCH faster with that), 
but I have to deal with real-world CPUs that are here NOW (so it might make 
sense to have runtime detection for AVX-512 only in 1 or 2 years, and 
requiring it is simply not possible within the next decade).

        Kevin Kofler



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