Retire a package from Fedora i686 (not x86_64)

[Reindl Harald]

Am 07.11.2015 um 19:01 schrieb Kevin Kofler:
> 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)

that *really* depends

these days (and i talk about hardware from 2011) you can virtualize 
things fast, easy and efficient and consolidate machines on more or less 
cheap hardware

besides it brings new CPU capabilities it saves a lot of energy:

* one machine instead 2,3,4 or 10 machines
* the new hardware needs so much less power
* your UPS (in case you use one) can be cheaper or lasts longer
* cooling is easier, cheaper and not that loud

some numbers in that context:

in early 2010 we planned a UPS systems to last for around 3 hours, with 
the current hardware and after consolidation the same UPS lasts 9 hours 
now and the air conditioner has lower load and longer lifetime

the same applies to consumer hardware, my 365/7 running homeserver from 
2011 is a power beast and the whole IT needs around 50W while the 
previous hardware needed 120W - that's money, that's heat on summer 
days, that's less noise and hardddisks don't need to replaced that often 
because they are cooler

> * 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.

that is true but see above

> 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)

maybe you did not get "not that i say Fedora should go ahead and build 
with -mavx" but we talk about SSE3

talking about a rapid moving distribution like Fedora and at the same 
time hestitate to use technology available for a decade is strange - i 
guess people plan to run their hardware for 10, 12, 15 years are not 
using typically a distribution like Fedora


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