On 7/13/21, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> I wasn't really a fan of that change but my stance is that we should use > AltiVec > in packages where it makes sense as the majority of the ppc64 port users > will > have a machine that suppport AltiVec. please *do not* do this. we are designing a modern Libre/Open CPU which will not punish developers or ourselves, stabbing ourselves in the head with 950 instructions. Power ISA is supposed to be RISC. the only reason SIMD was made mandatory in EABI v2 was because there was nobody making hardware other than IBM to object to what is becoming recognised as an extremely serious and costly mistake for the future of the OpenPOWER ecosystem. if people continue to assume that SIMD is acceptable just because the only current hardware is from IBM it only makes it harder and more and more costly to unravel the f***up and widens and already yawning barrier to entry for new implementations of OpenPOWER. PLEASE, really, for god's sake, please do NOT recommend people propagate the SIMD paradigm. https://www.sigarch.org/simd-instructions-considered-harmful/ l.
