Is my computer able to run the future versions of Pale Moon as planned? Topic is solved

[Mæstro]

Because the HP Pavilion DV6 7000 has been released with different processors, I note that it has the AMD A8-4500M APU, having been manufactured in September 2012. The official specifications say nothing about instruction sets, while another site mentions ‘Advanced Vector Extensions’ and ‘AVX 1·1’. While I would understand this to mean that I should enjoy support still, asking here to confirm seems wisest.

[RealityRipple]

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grep flags /proc/cpuinfo -m 1

Should spit out all the flags for your CPU (-m 1 to prevent core redundancy for multi-core CPUs)

avx should be a decent way down the list, avx2 should be pretty close to the very end.

[athenian200]

Because the HP Pavilion DV6 7000 has been released with different processors, I note that it has the AMD A8-4500M APU, having been manufactured in September 2012. The official specifications say nothing about instruction sets, while another site mentions ‘Advanced Vector Extensions’ and ‘AVX 1·1’. While I would understand this to mean that I should enjoy support still, asking here to confirm seems wisest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piledrive ... re)#Design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piledrive ... re)#Mobile

Wikipedia heavily implies that your CPU should support AVX, because it's a Piledriver CPU, which is a newer revision of Bulldozer, and that definitely supported AVX. I would prefer to have confirmation from AMD that it does work, because I know Intel at least occasionally crippled mobile variants, but anecdotally I've heard AMD never did that. AMD's spec sheets for individual CPUs seem lacking compared to Intel's, but they also seem to do less product segmentation that would require such detailed spec sheets in the first place.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A-Ser ... 884.0.html

NotebookCheck and similar sites also list AVX among the supported instruction sets for that CPU.

You can also just try Nuck-TH's AVX builds and see if they crash on startup for you:

ftp://ftp2.palemoon.org/avx/linux/

My prediction is that the AVX builds will work fine, but AVX2 builds should crash, either on startup or after being used for a while. We picked AVX as our baseline because a lot of people here have older 2012/2011 hardware that supports AVX but not AVX2, and we have a lot fewer users on hardware that has no AVX support at all.

What's cool about this, is that adopting AVX actually speeds things up significantly on older CPUs like this that support it, because it allows them to be fully utilized without needing an upgrade. So it's kind of an interesting tradeoff, makes things run a lot better on some older CPUs past the cutoff, doesn't work at all on ones a couple years older.

[Mæstro]

Running Ripple’s test gives the following:

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flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl nonstop_tsc cpuid extd_apicid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq monitor ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt aes xsave avx f16c lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs xop skinit wdt lwp fma4 tce nodeid_msr tbm topoext perfctr_core perfctr_nb cpb hw_pstate ssbd vmmcall bmi1 arat npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save tsc_scale vmcb_clean flushbyasid decodeassists pausefilter pfthreshold

As Athenian has predicted, AVX, but not AVX 2 is supported. Your choice was clever, for my own computer falls neatly in the range. I get strange looks elsewhere for having retained a computer from this era which still runs well for me, so I am pleased to hear I am in good company. Thank you both for helping me check!