Chrome Will Soon Lose Support For Some Ancient CPUs (techspot.com) 141
If you're one of the few people still using a PC with an x86 processor more than 15 years old, here's another reason to upgrade: the devices will not work with future Chrome releases, starting with version 89 of the world's most popular browser. TechSpot reports: The Chromium development team announced that CPUs older than the Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 would not work with Chrome 89 and future versions as they do not meet the new minimum instruction set requirement of SSE3 (Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3) support. So, if you are still sporting an Intel Atom or Celeron M CPU, you'll soon be counting Chrome as one of the many programs that are incompatible with your potato-like rig. The devices will no longer attempt to install the browser, while running it will result in the software crashing. It's noted that the change only affects Windows as Chrome OS, Android and, Mac already require SSE3 support.
This IS the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with software today when your browser, a darn web browser dictates what computer / cpu you can use.
Re:This IS the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's the problem?
It's noted that the change only affects Windows as Chrome OS, Android and, Mac already require SSE3 support.
You'd think that a /. "editor" would notice something missing in there and maybe call it out.
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>> a darn web browser dictates what computer / cpu you can use.
The darn browser _IS_ the "computer" these days, for most users.
Support for hardware old enough to drive a car? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm trying to figure out a reason why any software should support all the hardware out there and I'm not coming up with any good reasons.
Maybe there are some government/military systems which have to use 15+ year old hardware (IO buses or software requirements) but, if that's the case, then I would think that the people responsible for the systems don't want people surfing the web on them and making them available to being compromised.
As the person who supported IBM Token Ring NetBEUI from 1986 to 2006 I can say it's really frustrating keeping up with new OSes and processors when the sole purpose of doing the work is so that a marketeer can put that support is available for the latest OS/hardware when there is literally NOBODY asking for it.
If running the latest version of Chrome is that important to you (Chrome 87 will still run, as will FireFox and others), then download Chromium and do your own builds for your non SSE3 system. If you're not the only person with this requirement, then you'll find others that will help you with updating the code base.
Re:Support for hardware old enough to drive a car? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a lot of hardware a lot younger than 15 years old that will not work. A lot of Atom processors, for example, I have more than a few Atom tablets or micro PCs that are well under 5 years old.
Blame Intel all you want for making processors like that.
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According to Wikipedia every Intel Atom every made has supported SSE3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In fact if you look at the page for SSE3 and the list of CPUs that had it, it seems that TFA may be wrong. Intel Core (not Core 2 Duo) had it, AMD Althon 64 had it. It's been common since 2005 and I couldn't find any CPUs made in the last decade that didn't support it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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There's some extras the SSSE3, which often gets lumped in and which are less widespread, and aren't supported pre-bulldozer, those just scrape in within the last decade, though they were probably in the distribution channel a while longer.
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Some people act like the world should just stay static as soon as they get comfortable in it.
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It sounds like you think that is a bad idea.
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Some people act like everything should be changed constantly just for the sake of it, regardless of whether the previous thing was broken or not or whether the change is actually an improvement.
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The problem with software today when your browser, a darn web browser dictates what computer / cpu you can use.
No, I'd say you are wrong. That's a problem only if you are inflexible and MAKE it a problem. Some points:
1) Chrome is not the only browser in the world.
2) Anyone running Windows on these 'ancient' CPU's (Personally, I consider an 'ancient CPU' being something like 6502 or Z80) and connecting it to internet is an utter, complete moron.
3) If you use open source software, that will never be a problem; you can always compile the program in question to suit your CPU. Well, trying to compile Chromium on a 15-yea
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Or a paint program.
Oh, wait ...
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No, it's people putting 15-year-old machines and OS onto the modern net and expecting to function and perform in an identical manner into perpetuity.
P.S. There's literally nothing stopping you using Chromium and compiling it without SSE3 support.
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It's not just web browsers too. :(
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The problem with software today when your browser, a darn web browser dictates what computer / cpu you can use.
How is that a problem of software today? Software has always dictated what computer / CPU you can use. This has literally always been the case and is why software is published with system requirements.
Also worth mentioning Chrome is a bastard to use on a 4GB RAM system. The last desktop CPU which didn't have SSE3 support only had a 2GB max RAM cap. A user would have to be a special kind of masochist to want to run a modern Chrome build on that machine.
If you spent $50 at a local pawn shop you'll have someth
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Well... that's compatibility for you. It's been a thing for a very long time. Some things are coded to require certain types of hardware. That's life.
Not "Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3" (Score:4, Informative)
Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 is known as SSSE3, which according to the tweet is not what is currently being targeted.
SSE3 is, and is supported even on "ancient" CPU's like the newest P4s, the Atom, and the oldest Athlon 64's.
Yes this distinction is quite confusing, but given that SSSE3 wasn't supported on AMD until 2011, google probably made the right choice here.
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Incompetent Techspot "journalist" is incompetent. I don't know where they find these people; clearly not from /. Then again, writing about what you know nothing about, and having zero research skills...that's the norm.
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Yeah, not uncommon, but surprising they couldn't even bother to read the original information where the devs are discussing the differences between the two, when they were implemented etc. It's bad enough to just clickbait someone else's reporting but not bothering to read it seems to be a new low.
How many devices does this really effect? (Score:2)
A few fossil Thinkpad collectors may be annoyed but they can use another browser and many likely abandoned Chrome as a resource hog already.
it's literally a secret (Score:3)
they know the number of machines it will impact, and they link to an analysis in their document, but the document says "sorry, Googlers only". it's a literal secret.
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Could you rattle off a few?
I have a working Thinkpad that is otherwise useful. Many websites are still browser agnostic and play fine but popular ones, like Youtube, won't work with the last supported version of firefox or Palemoon. IE6 is a non-starter. In spite of it's age I find it MUCH faster that my corporate laptop running Windows 10 on an i5 multi-core, multi-Ghz processor.
Newer is not always better.
And I
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Another reason I still have that machine is because it's great to play DOS era games on the real hardware
actual technical document (Score:5, Informative)
https://docs.google.com/docume... [google.com]
tldr is that they want to use fast features of modern processors features like SSE3 and to do that while also supporting older CPUs they claim they have to use dynamic dispatch, (in other words loading different binary code at runtime), and the "Engineering Cost" is too high, and there are a "very small number" of processors that will be impact - then they link to a secret document that shows exactly what number "very small" is.
Alphabet only has about 150,000,000,000.00 dollars cash on hand so it is understandable they need to cut down on costs.
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Given how bloated websites have become today, it's unlikely that these older processors would make for a very satisfactory browsing experience in any case. Aside from low performance, such processors tend to have fairly low limits as to the size of memory they can use too.
But runtime detection of SSE3 support is for precompiled builds, if you're compiling it yourself you could build it to not require SSE3. There is almost certainly an architecture-independent implementation of every function in order to sup
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Watching Firefox around the time they required SSE2, first they would have 2 implementations of some functions, then once they required SSE2, they removed the non-SSE2 version of the function.
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SSE only exists on x86, they are going to have implementations for other architectures and likely a generic compilable C implementation to aid porting to new architectures.
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True, as Chrome supports more architectures.
Sources of native application friction (Score:2)
The problem is trying to stuff it all in a browser, even with "native" support. That pile of festering code is what eats all the cycles and all the memory. Everything you want to do with it becomes an unsatisfactory user experience because you are using that webbrowser. Email clients, usenet clients, chat clients, music players, video players, remote access applications, even bloated full-of-bullshit office applications (I use a typesetter program for same, much simpler, better results), it all works pretty nicely. But fire up a webbrowser and you are guaranteed to bring whatever hardware you have to its knees. Which is perhaps why we all worship the 'web so much. We are just following our hardware's example.
I was under the impression that the shift from native applications to web applications was for several reasons: OS incompatibility, allowlisting by the OS publisher, certificate cost, and installation friction.
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You make a good point about considering the perspective of a first-time user instead of an application developer. I'll rephrase from that perspective.
I don't care if my favourite client program is available on the other guy's OS. I care it is available on my favourite OS. He can have a program of his own. As long as client and server talk, and that works best using a well-defined openly published standard, happy days.
Say you want to communicate with a given friend who uses a particular application. You look up the application and find a fairly complete protocol spec along with a reference implementation for an OS other than your favorite. Further searches fail to turn up a compatible client application for your favorite OS, as the protocol and application are fairly new an
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"Engineering cost" does not refer to monetary cost, it refers to the amount of effort required and the compromises that must be made to support something.
In this case it sounds like they would need to maintain parallel versions of the code, which means fully supporting both, keeping them secure and so on. All for the sake of supporting some very old CPUs in systems that will probably struggle to run Chrome anyway.
If it's a problem for you then I suggest you ask for a refund.
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Alphabet only has about 150,000,000,000.00 dollars cash on hand so it is understandable they need to cut down on costs.
This isn't about cost in dollars. Engineering cost includes among other things distraction and work overhead which quickly can lead to mistakes, additional bugs, and distractions from relevant work.
Before you pickup the pitchfork maybe also consider the "engineering cost" here is the poor end user who somehow thinks it wise to run Chrome on a machine with 2GB of RAM (assuming the user actually maxed out the RAM on the chipset of the day). Maybe they are doing the world a favour by reminding them that their
It's a Compiler Switch. (Score:2)
This is simply what it is, plus a certain amount of hand woven witch crafted SSE3 instructions ..
And I highly doubt the hand crafted part.
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Likely that they will only produce/distribute x64 binaries created with this build option.
lynx can't show every web page (Score:5, Informative)
But it can run on hundreds of ancient CPUs. And nobody can get it to mine bitcoin with javascript/wasm/NaCl when I use lynx. Plus I don't spend all day watching YouTube videos on sharpening knives and slam ball exercises.
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Re:lynx can't show every web page (Score:5, Funny)
decoding LZW in my head in order to read the image captcha is part of the fun!
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old shit is old (Score:2)
What if I turn off "Hardware Acceleration" (Score:2)
What if I turn off "Hardware Acceleration" in the settings. Won't it still work?
This makes no sense.
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What if I turn off "Hardware Acceleration" in the settings. Won't it still work?
No, "Hardware Acceleration" means it uses your GPU. This change will be compiling the main binary to use new instructions (SSE3) which did not exist on older CPUs. If you have a very old CPU then it simply will not run.
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It is rather unlikely that you're actually using a machine that doesn't support SSE3. The summary was wrong; Atoms and most anything else people are still holding on to are fine.
If you really are running Windows 7+ on a 2003-era CPU, here's the proper procedure for hardware acceleration:
You have now reached the proper hardware acceleration: 9.8m/s^2 as it descends.
32-bit (Score:3)
Crap. I was presently surprised to find out they still had a 32-bit version that ran on 32-bit Windows 10. Will have to check to see if it will still work or not.
But chrome has broken so much lately, Palemoon/Newmoon/Serpent/Firefox are still much better choices.
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But chrome has broken so much lately
Like what?
I own an affected computer and say good riddance (Score:2)
Yes, I'll not be able to use Chrome, and therefore, lose Vikky for alexa support. But guess what? Even though I am personally worse off, I think that, over all, this is a good thing.
I wish windows/linux followed suit, and started to (progresively) require more advanced CPU/GPU support, to (slowly) weed out ancient machines.
For example, windows could move (progresively) from requiring SSE2 to SSE4 (for enhanced performance). From requiring a WDDM 1.0 to WDDM 2.4 (for added stability and performance), and fr
Funny (Score:2)
Strange, my Lenovo Yogabook (previous version) runs Android and has an Atom processor. Mind you, it isn't anywhere near 15 years old
Summary wrong: Atoms are fine, many Celeron Ms too (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunate that TechSpot didn't check the facts before publishing.
All Atom models support SSE3 - even the document linked mentions that march=atom implies not only SSE3 but also SSSE3. The Celerons that are impacted are those based on Banias or Dothan; Dothan is a 2003 design. Yonah, Merom, and Penryn Celeron M processors support SSE3. Any Intel Core (not just Core 2) supports it, as do even Prescott Pentium 4s.
This will impact almost exactly nobody. Chrome dropped Windows XP support 5 years ago. If you're running Windows 7 or later, here in the year 2021, you are pretty certainly not running it on a 2003-era CPU. No reason to be whining here.
Re:Summary wrong: Atoms are fine, many Celeron Ms (Score:5, Funny)
Actually it's quite possible to run Windows 7 32bit on a pre-SSE3 CPU. That said if you're running Windows 7 32bit on 2GB of RAM and running a modern Chrome release at the same time, that's a level of masochism that would make even a BDSM dominatrix say "Daaaam! Too hardcore for me."
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I think they meant SSSE3 in general. SSE3 is not interesting, SSSE3 actually has some additions that makes it worthwhile over SSE2.
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While SSSE3 would disqualify more CPUs, it is very clear from Google's document that they're requiring SSE3, not SSSE3.
And that makes sense. While Intel introduced SSSE3 in 2006 and not too many people are using Chrome for Windows on processors older than that, AMD didn't introduce SSSE3 until 2011. The Steam survey shows 100% of Steam users with SSE3 but only ~99% with SSSE support. If Google wants to make use of newer instructions they'll do runtime detection or something.
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Then it is entirely pointless, there is almost nothing worthwhile in SSE3. Some now deprecated fetch and horizontal add.
SSSE3 has the all important shuffle instruction.
Let's be real here (Score:4, Insightful)
If you run CPUs this old, Chrome not working anymore is the least of your worries.
Surely (Score:2)
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My rule for this (Score:2)
My boss is more willing to stop support for older machines, and he pays me.
There is a problem since I make a living writing iOS software, and it's kind of impossible to get phones running iOS 10, iOS 11 or iO
Calm down (Score:4, Informative)
The whole issue is blown out of proportions by the /. crowd.
Let's be honest: no one expects computers from the early 00s to be able to browse the modern web as most PCs from that era contain less than 2GB of RAM and are often completely usable for browsing the web anyways unless you're OK with watching a slide show and taking minutes to load a web page. We are talking maybe about 0.01% of running PCs. At this point you'd better buy a smartphone with 4GB of RAM which will cost you less than $100.
well there goes my old Acer Aspire One (Score:2)
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"here's another reason to upgrade" (Score:2)
So, ... old CPUs will be the only ones secure? (Score:2)
Software moves on (Score:2)
I remember old RedHat distros switching to i686 from i386 (which was probably i486 in practice). Compilers and programs move on, and uses newer instruction sets, better cache awareness, and of course more registers.
The old CPUs are still supported in source. I think it might still be possible to find i386 Linux. But almost all mainstream ones are now x86_64 only.
(Side note: Best option was Gentoo, where I could set flags for exactly what my machine has. However I gave up on them when their repository got ha
Re:GAY DINOSAUR: no internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome is becoming the new Internet Explorer of browsers. Site and app devs are forced to cater to their whims and bugs due to market share.
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Chrome is becoming the new Internet Explorer of browsers. Site and app devs are forced to cater to their whims and bugs due to market share.
Really? Can you point to me a standards compliant website which didn't work in Chrome and that you had to work around a Chrome bug to make it work?
Chrome is IE in influence only. It's a far cry from the actual shit that web developers had to endure during IE's reign, where you didn't have the option of producing a standards complaint website and had to code specifically for IE. At least on Chrome this shit is completely optional. And more so at least Chrome is designed with at least a basis of speed and sec
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Yes please do. I'd be truly amazed considering Chrome is the most standards compliant browser on the market. And no, implementing extra functionality doesn't in any way change the fact that we have web standards and that they work in Chrome.
Nah (Score:5, Informative)
Google isn't deciding what's allowed on the internet, it's just going out to the woodshed with them to throw them in the woodchipper.
Now here's the thing. I think it's a good idea to remove optimizations for older CPU's if it actually removes memory bloat, however that's not what's at stake here. There is nothing stopping Google from maintaining these optimizations in perpetuity other than the CPU's losing those features, which they haven't.
It's more likely some dang nerd at google wants to refactor the code for some dubious reason and saw they could chop one file up into 100 itty bitty ones, and a second nerd wanted to get rid of all these itty bitty files thereafter.
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It should not be acceptable for a company to prevent use of a perfectly functional piece of software after a support period. Sure they should be able to stop supporting it - but they should not disable existing installs. (Even as bad as Flash is - I think forceful removal of it is unacceptable.)
In such a situation, maybe the company could be absolved of liability for the "old" software, for some reasonable definition of "old". I'm not actually convinced that 10 years is old enough though. 20 years is mor
Distributing hard coded binary?! (Score:2)
Who would have thought that in 2020 people are still using archaic programming languages that distribute binaries compiled to specific instruction sets.
Just in time compilers combined with caching have been around for a long time. Not only does it allow different architectures to be used but it also avoids non-transparent objects accessed in dynamic libraries to have extra things added to them without breaking the caller.
But no, we still use a compilation/linker model that was developed for Fortran 60 year
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Firefox is slowly migrating to Rust, but that is also a compiled language. Or rather, it compiles to LLVM. But then, so can/are C and C++. LLVM can be JITted, so the language is not the problem here. The problem is if a program requires a specific instruction set, then no amount of JITting will help, because it still needs those specific instructions.
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And they all have the same root cause - people not wanting to pay to get things adequately maintained because short term reward is better than long term responsibility.
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That was my assumption yes. Or are they going to disable the auto-update and/or nag to update past that last version?
It's a compiler flag to make it faster (Score:4, Informative)
> It's more likely some dang nerd at google wants to refactor the code for some dubious reason and saw they could chop one file up into 100 itty bitty ones, and a second nerd wanted to get rid of all these itty bitty files thereafter.
It's not about touching the source code. It's about the compiler flags and performance on processers that people actually use (2004 and later).
SSE3 adds instructions that make code up to four times faster.
If you're compiling for pre-2004 CPUs, the compiler might emit machine code equivalent to the following assembly:
add eax, 0x4
add ebx, 0x4
add ecx, 0x4
add edx, 0x4
That's four instructions, taking four cycles.
SSE adds the addsubps instruction, which does the same thing with something like:
addsubps xmm0, 0x4
That accomplishes the same thing in just one instruction. It's four times faster.
addsubps is four times faster, but didn't exist in the Pentium 3.
So that machine code (.exe file) won't run on a Pentium 3.
Here's a real example (Score:5, Informative)
A real example that's used a lot is copying / moving a string from one place in memory to another. In pseudocode the executable for old processors does this:
While i Len(source)
Destination[i]= source[i]
i = i + 1
With sse (modern processors) it's:
While i Len(source)
Destination[i] =16 source[i]
i = i + 16
It runs 16 times faster by copying 16 bytes at a time.
It can do that because SSE registers are 128 bits (8 bytes).
So the choices are:
A. Make it 16 faster on computers that people use.
B. Keep having it be really slow for everyone, in case someone wants to run the newest Chrome on an antique computer (a Pentium 3 that somehow has at least 4GB of RAM).
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C. Make two builds of chrome/chromium. One with SSE3 flags, one without. They already have two windows builds, not counting all the other architecture.
If it's only a compilation issue, instead of modifying the current 32 bits no SSE3 pipeline to use SSE3, what's hard in keeping that pipeline, copying it, and making the new one use SSE3?
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Who for? Point to me someone who has the RAM requirement to run Chrome but doesn't have SSE3 support. That era had a RAM cap at around 2GHz, using a modern variant of Chrome on such a system would be absolutely painful.
I'm going to assume that Google has some actual data on how many people actually run Chrome on these old chipsets and that these people are not even remotely worthwhile supporting with a modern browser.
At some point you're just going to have to accept the fact that these potatoes are not the
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I suppose someone might do that. Chromium being open source and all.
I did gloss over a reason that might not be easy to do because I was trying to keep things simple in my post.
There are a few different ways to get the SSE (newer and faster) instructions in the executable:
One is to allow the compiler to do so. Modern compilers are pretty amazing at optimizing. The machine code produced sometimes sometimes doesn't resemble the C/C++ source code much at all. The compiler will do things like using SSE.
Another
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a Pentium 3 that somehow has at least 4GB of RAM
I think this piece here is wildly understated. If you have a CPU lacking the functionality to run Chrome, you'd be mad if you're running a current version of Chrome.
SSE3 was introduced in the Pentium4 Prescott. It's predecessor was Northwood. Having a quick look back through the history books:
Pentium 4 HT 3.06Ghz was one of the last Pentium desktop CPUs which didn't have SSE3. That puts you in Intel 845G chipset territory. That combination supported 2GB of RAM. Variants of the 865 also supported this chip,
Re: It's a compiler flag to make it faster (Score:2)
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Yeah that's true, it doesn't make the binary that much smaller.
The SSE does execute in one clock, so it makes it that much faster. (I just checked the Intel instruction table, because there are multi-cycle instructions).
Obviously we could go into a lot of further detail, and I'd probably learn a lot from you, but I wanted to point out the basic idea.
SSE criticism (Score:2)
The nice thing about the SSE standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Try reading them in a hexdump or disassembly (Score:2)
I'm in the middle of a 13 week process of reverse-engineering and exploiting 121 binaries.
Every day I disassemble a program, try to understand it, and then figure out how to exploit it. 11 such programs each week.
Sometimes, I get to try to just read the program in hexedit.
For anyone who hates the size and complexity of the instruction set, I hate that just as much or more right now. Probably more, because most people who know how complex it is are probably starting out with more previous assembly knowledg
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my understanding is:
* SSE is strictly speaking x86-family only
* other platforms like ARM have their own SIMD instruction sets
There are wrapper libraries [github.io] available which abstract away the architecture-specific semantics of the various vendors' SIMD instructions.
All this to say, presumably chrome requires SSE on x86-family platforms, or an equivalent SIMD instruction set on other architectures. No SIMD, no chrome 89.
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ARM and other platforms have other collections of SIMD instruction sets which are targeted at compile time.
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Mac requires SSE3 because every single x86 mac ever made had SSE3 support, and the very first publicly released x86 macos also required sse3.
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There is no such thing as an x86 mac without SSE3. The first core duo (and core solo in the mac mini) based macbooks supported SSE3, which is why some hackintosh builds included an SSE3 emulator so you could run the OS on a machine which lacked SSE3 support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Does ARM have SSE3?
When you run x86 code on an M1 Mac, it gets compiled to ARM code, and the compiler fakes the x86 hardware checks so it looks like a newish x86 computer. Definitely supports SSE3; I think 256 bit registers are not supported. So in five or ten years when your software _requires_ support for 256 bit registers it would fail, but then Apple can update the compiler.
Apple has a bit of history for that. In early MacOS versions that had a call "what processor am I running on". Then they introduced PowerPC, and th
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If they mean all Atoms, Intel released their last consumer Atom in December 2013 (7 years ago) and surely sold them for some time after that. So that wouldn't even be "15 years old". If all you do on the computer is Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Youtube - so, most people - those are still viable computers.
To me, "Ancient" would be beige-box era stuff. So, a bit before the Athlon 64s they mention.
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Yeah, I just looked up the Atom 230 and N270, some of the earlier models released in 2008. They shipped in a lot of EEEPCs and probably represent the Atom's heyday. They both have SSE3. What a shitty summary.
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Z-80 users unite! Stop the oppression.
Your furnace (Score:2)
You like the idea of buying a new furnace every 15 years?
A refrigerator?
A dishwasher? Clothes washer? Dryer?
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A furnace isn't the same as an antique laptop. The furnace doesn't continue to get less efficient as time goes on. It still heats my house just as good as the day it was installed. Now your laptop trying to navigate javascript heavy websites with limited resources is a different story.
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Don't fret;
you can sleep in peace tonight knowing your precious WSVGA machine should still receive Chrome updates, as the earliest Atom chips [wikipedia.org] (since 2008) supported SSE3!
Not consigned to the garbage bin just yet... phew! ;)