Comment by dataflow
2 years ago
> That said, in some processor lines (i.e. Atom), support for this instruction set was introduced rather late (2021).
Just one little sentence at the end but quoting it since it feels important.
2 years ago
> That said, in some processor lines (i.e. Atom), support for this instruction set was introduced rather late (2021).
Just one little sentence at the end but quoting it since it feels important.
These are bad processors born out of ridiculous market segmentation done by Intel for which we pay for dearly (also worth calling out making ECC server-only feature, because profit, exabytes of user data corrupted be damned).
Not only they are not worth targeting, it is a moral imperative not to consider them for pieces of software like PostgreSQL. If the push comes to shove, a "-compat" or "-legacy" flavour of binaries can be offered to select few users which use older systems with CPUs made before 2011 (pre-Sandy-Bride and Jaguar respectively), which would allow the overall ecosystem get healthier while not leaving affected people behind.
The Atom-based processors are bad not because of market segmentation but because Intel is perennially unable to make more than one good architecture at a time. The ones that are bad because of market segmentation are the processors with a Core family microarchitecture lobotomized down to the i3, Pentium or Celeron product lines, leaving them years behind on feature support that's physically present but fused off.