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by BoredomIsFun 106 days ago
> lots of commercial software is now compiled for newer x86 64 extensions.

Almost all software I encountered - including Windows 10 and precompiled Debian 13 - needs only SSE4.2, essentially mid-2000s ISA. Intel produced until very recently (early 2020s) Celeron CPUs which did not even support AVX.
1 comments
sidewndr46 106 days ago
People focus on AVX entirely too much, it is stuff like POPCNT that matters more. Which as you pointed out, is part of SSE4.2
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BoredomIsFun 105 days ago
...which has been with us almost 20 years.
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sidewndr46 105 days ago
Yet I still have regular conversations explaining "there is no way our customers are running on hardware that doesn't support this, where would they even be getting the hardware from, 2008?". I have a set of requirements in front of me requiring software to run on not only all Intel 64-bit chips, but also all Intel 32-bit chips.
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