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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions#Late...

Even my last, crazy long in the tooth, desktop supported this and it lived to almost 10 years old before being replaced.

However at the same time, not even offering a fallback path in non-assembly?

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> However at the same time, not even offering a fallback path in non-assembly?

There's probably not any hand-written assembly at issue here, just a compiler told to target x86_64-v2. Among others, RHEL 9 and derivatives were built with such options. (RHEL 10 bumped up the minimum spec again to x86_64-v3, allowing use of AVX.)

Or even, a compiler told to target nothing in particular, and a default finally toggled over from "Oh, we're 'targeting x86'? So CPUs from the early 2000s then" to "Oh, we're 'targeting x86'? So CPUs from the mid-2010s then."

Looking at the issue their builders seem to be Opterons G3 (K10?)[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_10h

I can imagine this has to be like that as they usually get $1500 per month in donations.

You could buy a newer one but I guess they have other stuff they have to pay for.

For $500 you can get a decent refurbished server on ebay that supports those “new” extensions

This is a bit of vicious circle. How much of that money goes even into keeping those servers running? The electricity bill alone, geez. They could do a dedicated fundraiser to get themselves two boxes that are a decade old and still have spare parts available, coming from Broadwell era, they will have enough instruction set support to cover the baseline towards which multiple distros are converging (Haswell and up).

Given their target audience, they could probably just request a hardware donation. Some sysadmin out there is probably getting rid of exactly what they need.

if it's colocated (surely the case) they aren't paying per kWh

I am 100% sure that if they put out a call for action and asked for hardware donations they would be able to get newer stuff. Ryzen 7 1700 goes for as cheap as 50$, DDR4 ram at supported speeds (2133 MHz) is also dirt cheap.

$1500 / month is probably swallowed by how much of powerpigs those Opertons are, like they are bad, real bad.

>$1500/month

Wow, i just got into newpipe/fdroid. Its neat to think even a donation the size of mine can be almost individually meaningful :)

at this point they're guzzling so much power the electricity is more expensive than replacement platform

I have a home server with a 9th gen i7 that's doing jack sh!t most of the time, is there a way to donate some compute time to build F-Droid packages?

The problem with offering fallbacks is testing -- there isn't any reasonable hardware which you could use, because as you say it's all very old and slow.

I'm sure theyll appreciate your old desktop donation

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