Opinions on packaging ATLAS (for the x86 architecture)

James Wilkinson fedora at aprilcottage.co.uk
Sat Sep 26 18:06:23 UTC 2009


Hi there,

I don’t normally intrude on the developers list, but I’ve seen something
I believe to be factually wrong, and don’t want Fedora to make a
decision based on it:

Deji Akingunola wrote:
> ii). According to smolt statistics, cpus with speeds <= 512 MHz (which
> is a superset of the non-SSE P6 architecture) is only 0.8% of Fedora
> install-base, and cpus with speed >2 GHz (which are subset of SSE2
> capable cpus)
> are more than 58%. Therefore to support the majority, the main 'atlas'
> package will be the sse2 variants, which will provides 'atlas-sse2'
> and there will be sub-packages for atlas-no_sse, atlas-sse, and
> atlas-sse3.

This is right for Intel processors, but AMD processors introduced these
extensions later.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/amd-64/Pages/amd-64.aspx
says (about AMD processors):
    “SSE instructions were brought on board with the AMD Athlon XP
    processor” 
and
    “the AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Opteron™ processors offer strong
    performance, thanks to the addition of SSE2 support”

This means that there are non-SSE i686 processors with speeds of up to
1400 MHz, and non-SSE2 processors with speeds of 2.2 GHz.

Thanks for your attention,

James.

-- 
E-mail:     james@ | [Computer] chips consume power, and in return they give
aprilcottage.co.uk | you heat and a few electrons in the right places.
or James.Wilkinson | Occasionally they also give you a flash of light and
@sparex.co.uk      | smoke as well, but few chips do that twice.
                   |     -- Charlie Demerjian, The Inquirer




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