On Montag, 5. Dezember 2022 10:54:09 CET Thomas Zimmermann wrote:
Hi,
I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but after the long discussion about using old systems, I wondered if we could get an idea about the number of users with then-obsolete machines.
I couldn't find information about x86 CPU market share so I looked at Windows releases instead. Statcounter has information on that. [1] The worldwide stats looks something like this:
Win11: ~16%; Win10: ~70%; Win8.x: ~3.5%; Win7: ~10%; WinXP: ~0.5%
There's no clear connection between Windows releases and CPUs, so the metric is somewhat fuzzy. According to Wikipedia, Windows 7 was first released in 2009 and Windows 8 in 2012. x86-64-v2 was also released in 2009, but wasn't present in AMD CPUs until 2013.
Assuming that Windows 7 systems don't support -v2, but Windows 8 systems do, around 10% of _possible_ would not be supported by dropping pre-v2. That might be worth the performance/feature gains or not; IDK.
Many people still using Windows 7 do because they dislike the design changes introduced with Windows 8. Otherwise, Win8 market share would be higher (also requires just v1, same as Win7). Intel systems shipped between 2009 and 2012 shipped with Windows 7 but likely support v2.
Windows 10 and -v3 were both first released in 2015. It's much less clear what the impact would be. Win 11 requires it, so at least 16% of the possible users could use it. On pre-Windows 10 systems, -v3 is probably not supported. And for Windows 10 systems, IDK.
Lucky me obviously had a time machine when I bought my Haswell systems (x86_64-v3) in 2013. Though, for the Pentium and Celeron budget line, you have to wait until 2019 (Icelake) for AVX2. Win 11 runs on e.g. a Celeron G5900, which is v2 only (no AVX). So, your factual statements are full of errors already. Any interpretations based thereon are moot. Stefan