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Re: Increasing minimum 'i386' processor



Adrian Knoth <adi@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de> writes:

> On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 08:40:47AM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
>> > 6. DM&P/SiS Vortex86 and Vortex86SX.  These supposedly have all
>> >    586-class features except an FPU, and we could probably keep FPU
>> >    emulation for them.
>> 
>> FWIW, I do run Debian on such systems albeit with a custom kernel.
>> Given those CPU tend to be used in an "embedded" context I guess
>> it's ok if the official kernel does not support them. But it would be
>> nice if Debian's userspace could be kept compatible.
>
> On behalf of the multimedia camp, I'd like to point out that we'd love
> to see SSE as the lowest common denominator on the x86 platform.
>
> I'm fully aware that we can't, not even with i586 being the baseline.
> Since many multimedia applications don't do runtime CPU detection, only
> amd64 generally provides decent SIMD support to Debian users on x86
> these days.
>
>
> Long story short: userspace i386 compatibility would suck for
> multimedia. ;)
>
>
> Just my â?¬0.02
>
> PS: That's basically why we have packages like ardour-i686.

That's why you would have an i686 partial architecture with all the
multimedia stuff in there optimized.

MfG
        Goswin


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