On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 2:36 AM M. Zhou <lu...@debian.org> wrote: > > Indeed supporting number crunching programs on ancient > hardware is not meaningful, but the demand on Debian's > support for number crunching is not that strong according > to my years of observation. > > For popular applications that can take advantage of above-baseline > instruction sets, they will eventually write the dynamic code > dispatcher and add the fallback. > > For applications seriously need performance, they will > leave CPU and go to GPU or other hardware. If the user correctly > write the code and fully leverage GPU, the non-optimal CPU > code won't necessarily be a bottleneck. > > For applications seriously need CPU performance, they are > possibly going to tell the users how to tweak compiling > parameters and how to compile locally.
I have to disagree on this one. Yes, runtime detection and GPU acceleration is great and all, but not every scientific library does it and I think it's unrealistic for us to patch them all up. Also I don't like the point "since there is low demand for number crunching on Debian, so let's just continue to ignore this problem". At least I know a decent amount of people that use Debian (or downstream distros) for scientific number crunching. Compiling optimized for large workloads will always be a thing no matter the baseline, but when getting started distro packages are just one less thing to care about. On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 7:25 AM Andrey Rahmatullin <w...@debian.org> wrote: > > A partial arch (whatever that is, yeah) with the x86-64-v3 baseline, and > optionally raise the main amd64 baseline to x86-64-v2? +1