On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 21:44 +0200, Bartłomiej Piotrowski wrote:
> Actually, why don't raise the bar higher? SSE2 has been introduced in
> 2001 – that's 15 years to upgrade one's hardware and given my sad
> experiences with computers, I find it hard to believe anyone has that
> old PC that happens to run Arch.
>
> We used to advertise ourselves as optimized for modern processors. Our
> "i786" really should include SSE3. For the same reason I would not
> complain about requiring SSE4 instructions for amd64.
>
>>
In the 2000's AMD and Intel followed different paths with extensions.
Checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions and its
links suggest AVX was the point where the paths became the same again.
AVX was designed in 2008 , but first procesoors that supported it were
launched in 2011 .
My 2009 AMD opteron 2378 "Barcelona" processor advertises SSE, SSE2,
3DNow & 3DNowExt .
I couldn't find specifics about 3DNowExt , but chances are big that
software compiled with SSE3 , SSSE3 or SSE4 will crash on pre-2011 AMD
processors.
LW
