On Wed, 31 Jul 2019 at 09:15, Frantisek Zatloukal <fzatlouk@redhat.com> wrote:
Personally, I am not at all against raising the bar for baseline x86_64. Of course, it'd be ideal to have some sort of derived x86_64_avx arch, but if we find out it'd require too much of an investment into infra/releng, I'd be +1 for just changing the base x86_64. Sure, it'd make sense to actually see some numbers from Fedora compiled with SSE4/AVX/AVX2 and not just guess from Clear Linux results.

I see AVX2 is just too high baseline (although, all my PCs and laptops support that for at least 2 years), but raising the baseline to something like AVX or SSE4 might make sense. I don't know why people with *not ancient* computers should have degraded performance just because we want to support everything from K8 from 2003. But as I said, it'd be nice to see some benchmarks to base the decision on and have optimized x86_64 as secondary arch, if possible. 

On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 11:00 AM Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@chello.at> wrote:
* the performance increase to be had is marginal, given that we are mostly
  talking about code written in C or C++ without even compiler vectorization
  (-ftree-vectorize) turned on,




The problem with words like marginal is that what Kevin in his head and what you have in your head probably mean two different things. Also when I see such statistics, I usually wonder "Are they repeatable?" Not just in the case that someone else runs Clear Linux and gets similar timings.. but if I compile my code with those options do I get those numbers or do I need to use Clear Linux to do so because there are other changes not taken into account by just compiling things with an option?

This was something we ran into several times in the past with the race to keep up with Mandrake or SuSE during the i486/i586/i686 days.. and again with various super computer rebuilds years later. We can compile the code with the same options but you may not get the same speeds. There can be other changes in the structure of the executable chain from kernel down to file node structure. All of those need to be taken into account to 'duplicate' test results. 

Without doing that testing and confirming that we know all the options, we are no better off than the person who says they compile everything with -funrolloops 


--
Stephen J Smoogen.