On 27.09.22 10:33, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
On Tuesday 2022-09-27 10:28, Neal Gompa wrote:
The primary driver for upgrading the ISA level wasn't for performance.
But then, what was, and why is that something rated higher than a performance argument?
Good question. Let me guess what the reason might be. From Wikipedia.org X86-64 article, the "Microarchitecture levels" were invented by AMD and Intel together with RedHat and SUSE. I'd say at least the first two have a very strong interest in people getting rid of old hardware. Unfortunately (for them), 10 years old hardware nowadays is easily good enough for many uses. Of course that does not fit their interest in selling new stuff. So it needs to be made obsolete by means of "Windows 11 will not run because of missing TPM" (or whatever), "Linux distributions will not run because of missing x86-64-vX". I hope that at least debian will not be bribed into implementing this. These core2 duo machines with 8GB RAM of mine (Thinkpad X200s) that "we" are trying to get rid of here are happily running even Windows 10 or normally sized Browser sessions. They are not as snappy as my core i5-2520 (Thinkpad T420) or core i3-3320 (Thinkpad T430) machines, but very usable still. Not to mention home server machines using core2 duo / 16GB RAM and happily running owncloud, vdr (with a PCI card that can not be put into a newer PC due to apparent lack of PCI slots in newer machines), NFS server, openVPN, ... and some VMs for testing from time to time. So, at least for me, there really should be some convincing performance or maintenance cost arguments that persuade me to get rid of all these machines and replace them with newer ones, but not just "Intel/AMD wants this old stuff to die". -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman