[Development] Updating x86 SIMD support in Qt

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 19 January 2022 13:52:21 PST Kevin Kofler via Development wrote:
> The notebook has 4 GiB RAM. (That was the maximum available. I picked it
> because I wanted the notebook to last.) Fedora 35 with KDE Plasma runs fine
> on it. Not fast, but usable.

Whether Fedora decides to up the minimum requirement for a future edition is 
something you'll be in a better position to answer than I am.

The next question is whether you do (or would do) Qt 6 development on that 
laptop, while travelling and, if so, if you use (or would use) the binary 
packages from qt.io. If you build from source, it would not be a problem; if 
you use a distribution package, it's out of scope.

> But it is not my primary computer, my primary
> computer is the desktop on which I am typing this: Sandy Bridge Core
> i7-2600K (released 2011, supports up to AVX(1)), 16 GiB RAM.

Sandy Bridges and Ivy Bridges are more like the previous generation (Westmere) 
than the next (Haswell). For example, even though SNB does have a 32-byte-load 
instruction and it can issue two load instructions per cycle, it can't do two 
32-byte loads in the same cycle. That's something Haswell can and it is a 
cornerstone of the optimisations I've just made. So for those two, we'll keep 
the previous generation of optimisations, that focus on 16-byte (128-bit) 
loads and stores.

I used to have an SNB-based Mac Mini, but since Apple stopped providing 
updates for that generation, I was forced to upgrade.

In my other $DAYJOB, I still need to supprt the SNB and IVB-based servers 
(Jaketown and Ivytown, see [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_codenames

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel DPG Cloud Engineering