I don't think this stands a chance in hell. It's hard enough convincing people we can live without i686; "we're gonna make Fedora stop working with all CPUs made before 2013" has zero chance whatsoever. Adamwill (talk)
- In fact, even some CPU made in 2013. I have a server (in a DC) with a Intel Atom® Processor C233, who was launched in 2013, avx2 is not supported (and the server was installed 2 or 3 years ago). --Misc (talk) 17:42, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
- I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that unless this optimization is done as a runtime function switch (if AVX2 is present it uses an AVX2 optimized function, and if not it uses an older slower but compatible function. I believe there's distros out there that can/are doing this), then this is a SERIOUS issue. As noted above things like Atom CPUs (and their ilk) have a tendency to resurrect old micro-architectures and put them on new processes which improves them greatly, but won't include that functionality, as well as actively trying to throw away a lot of still very usable hardware (even ~2011 hardware is still very usable for many applications). --warthog9 (talk)
Concerns around AVX2 requirement
Over the next few years, there will be a growing number of alternative implementations of x86 available, many without AVX2 support. It seems to be highly premature, then, to mandate AVX2 as the minimum requirement, especially without evidence of a performance improvement or data showing number of impacted users (presumably quite large). This is a premature change. Premature by about 5-10 years in my own opinion, but that is debatable.
Unacceptable
This is absolutely unacceptable and would force me to look for a new distribution. Not even my Sandy Bridge Core i7 supports AVX2, not to mention my Core 2 Duo notebook that still runs Fedora perfectly fine right now. Sure, the notebook is 11 years old and the desktop 8 years, but those machines work perfectly fine and the desktop doesn't even perform that badly. If I have to choose between replacing the computers or replacing the distribution, my choice will be made fairly quickly.
My desktop's CPU only supports AVX 1, my notebook's CPU only up to SSSE3 (no SSE4 nor AVX).