Retire a package from Fedora i686 (not x86_64)

[drago01]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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

Compiling everything with sse3 does have a cost (dropping support for
some hardware) but what does it gain us?
Better performance in theory? To convince anyone you have to at least
provide numbers. Otherwise the discussion is a waste of time.