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,

Are you sure? Fore example (and there are more of them), lots of these do not seem marginal: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Clear-Linux-2019-Python-Perf , https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-2016-2018&num=3