Pale Moon x86-64 SSE2/AVX2

[billmcct]

Where were you before?

Costa Rica.

[Mike_Walsh]

Guys, I feel a bit of a klutz now.

Following my "outburst" earlier this year about the switch to the AVX 'requirement':-

viewtopic.php?p=250504#p250504

.....I've now realised that most of you were right.

I've had the big HP Pavilion desktop rig for the last 5 years or so. This is in my bedroom, and is where most of my browsing/Puppy development stuff, etc, takes place.

Because I'm a full-time carer for Mama who's 91 - and since I never found anybody daft enough to put up with me! - I live with her and do the scores of little tasks needed to allow her to remain in her own home & make her final years more pleasant. In the evenings, I spend time with her in the front room (which by necessity is now her living-room, bedroom, bathroom, etc) & keep her company. I keep a laptop here to help pass the time.

==========================================

We did have an ancient Dell Inspiron we'd bought for her in 2002, which was still going until 2021! It finally popped its clogs and gave up the ghost when the graphics chip died. Since it was a 32-bit only P4-based machine, I wasn't exactly sorry to see it go....although I'll give it one thing; I learnt from this that P4s were effectively indestructible. The hotter they got, the more they seemed to like it...

I replaced this with a second-hand D630 Dell Latitude off eBay. This had a Core2Duo, so again, no AVX. Turns out this was saddled with an nVidia mobile GPU from the time the industry was switching over to lead-free solder. These things ran very hot, and over the course of multiple thermal cycles the solder connections would eventually start to crack, so.......no display, and effectively dead again. This happened earlier this year.

I then found a later model Latitude on eBay for around GBP £60, in beautiful condition; this time with good old Intel HD4000 graphics.....and an Ivy Bridge mobile Core i5-3340m, from around 2012/3. Annnd.....yes; it has AVX. So, I feel I must apologise to anyone I may have inadvertently offended a few months ago..!

You guys were correct about how long the feature has been around. 'Twas summat I wasn't aware of (until I discovered the 'lack' of it. And why...)

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I simply have a job getting my head around this. The Pentium G5400 is a far newer chip, based on a much more up-to-date & power-efficient architecture, yet Intel take the arbitrary - and entirely capricious - decision to deliberately disable features that were probably on the chip when built in the foundry, all with the intention of driving dissatisfied consumers toward shelling out more money for more expensive CPUs that have the required feature (though probably little else in the way of 'extras').

I honestly thought "Big Blue" were mature enough to have moved beyond such juvenile shenanigans. Ah well; ya "live & learn". I shall have to keep my wits about me in future and keep an eye out for such goings-on....

So; I run Nuck-TH's SSE2 build on the big desktop rig....and I can now run the official AVX build on the Latitude. Everything's good.

(*shrug...)

Mike.

[Night Wing]

I then found a later model Latitude on eBay for around GBP £60, in beautiful condition; this time with good old Intel HD4000 graphics.....and an Ivy Bridge mobile Core i5-3340m, from around 2012/3. Annnd.....yes; it has AVX. So, I feel I must apologise to anyone I may have inadvertently offended a few months ago..!

You guys were correct about how long the feature has been around.

I have two laptops and they both support AVX. And they are "old" by today's standards.

One is a 64 bit, 14" HP dv4-5113cl built in 2012. It has an Intel i5-3210M Ivy Bridge processor in it with a processor speed of 2.50, 16 GB of memory and it originally came with 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium. It now is running the linux 64 bit distro MX Linux 23.4 (Libretto) Xfce.

The three linux browsers I use on it are all 64 bit and they are Pale Moon, Waterfox, Firefox. I use this laptop when I am traveling away from my home.

The second laptop is a 64 bit, 14" HP dv4-5213cl built in 2013. It has an Intel i5-3210M Ivy Bridge processor in it with a processor speed of 2.50, 16 GB of memory and it originally came with 64 bit (ugh!) Windows 8 Home. It now runs the linux 64 bit distro MX Linux 23.4 (Libretto) Xfce.

This laptop I gave to my wife. She uses two 64 bit linux browsers which are Firefox and Waterfox. She keeps this computer on our kitchen table and she takes it with her when she travels.

[Moonchild]

I simply have a job getting my head around this. The Pentium G5400 is a far newer chip, based on a much more up-to-date & power-efficient architecture, yet Intel take the arbitrary - and entirely capricious - decision to deliberately disable features that were probably on the chip when built in the foundry, all with the intention of driving dissatisfied consumers toward shelling out more money for more expensive CPUs that have the required feature (though probably little else in the way of 'extras').

Trust me when I say I was rather taken by surprise to learn that select newer Intel chips apparently lacked AVX. To me it makes no sense for a 60W Intel desktop CPU from 2018 to sport a fully DX12-capable iGPU, AES-NI, DDR4/PCIe3.0, but not AVX which had been around for 5+ years prior (and solidly present in AMD offerings around the same price point, in e.g. the 2200G). I guess it's one of those things like the ever-terrible Celeron line with purposefully crippled features, or the fact they kept stretching the 14nm lithography way past its time.

[andyprough]

Off-topic:

Because I'm a full-time carer for Mama who's 91 - and since I never found anybody daft enough to put up with me! - I live with her and do the scores of little tasks needed to allow her to remain in her own home & make her final years more pleasant. In the evenings, I spend time with her in the front room (which by necessity is now her living-room, bedroom, bathroom, etc) & keep her company. I keep a laptop here to help pass the time.

You sound like an absolute saint. I don't think anyone can understand how much it takes out of a person to care for elderly parents until they start doing it themselves. Or how thankless it is, although it is richly rewarding personally and spiritually.

[Mike_Walsh]

Off-topic:

You sound like an absolute saint. I don't think anyone can understand how much it takes out of a person to care for elderly parents until they start doing it themselves. Or how thankless it is, although it is richly rewarding personally and spiritually.

I don't know about being a 'saint'. But I have my reasons.

Born in the early 60s, my birth mother was only 14 when I came along. These days, such things are common-place.....but in those days, such things were regarded very dimly, and were seen as a real 'no-no' (especially in the UK of the time) so the family paid for her to spend time in a private nursing home until I was born. It kept things quiet, and was all swept under the carpet so as not to bring disrepute to the family (seems her father was a local solicitor, and well-respected in their local community in Surrey, just to the south of London).

Anyways; I was put up for adoption, and when I was just 6 months old a businessman and his wife, who were having trouble starting a family, took a chance on me. I'll be perfectly honest here; I fell on my feet, and had a brilliant upbringing, and a wonderful childhood.....in a household always filled with love & laughter. I'll always be grateful for the start I had in life; it could have turned out so much different. Although there's nothing forcing me to do so, in a way I see it as 'payback'.

I would far sooner Mama passed her final days in familiar surroundings where she's comfortable and happy. She deserves it......especially for putting up with all the crap I got up to as a kid!

Mawkish, aren't I?

Mike.

[andyprough]

Off-topic:

I would far sooner Mama passed her final days in familiar surroundings where she's comfortable and happy. She deserves it......especially for putting up with all the crap I got up to as a kid!

There's all kinds of activities you have to give up for yourself in order to give them that comfort of home at that age. It really is rather saintly.

[Nuck-TH]

33.5 is uploaded and autoupdate will eventually roll out as well

[karlchen]

33.5 is uploaded

Thank you very much, Nuck-TH, for your time and work.
Thanks also go to Moonchild, of course, for maintaining and improving Pale Moon.
palemoon-33.5.0.linux-x86_64-sse2_gtk2.tar.xz has been downloaded and installed to /opt/palemoon only a few minutes ago.
Typing this reply using Pale Moon 33.5.0 64-bit (sse2, gtk2) on Linux Mint 20.3 64-bit.

[frostknight]

Thanks also go to Moonchild, of course, for maintaining and improving Pale Moon.

100% true.

I may not understand all of his view points, but I am glad he is maintaining this web browser. The web is a bloated mess and I rather not use the shitty UI that modern web browsers use.

[UCyborg]

I'm still waiting for real life evidence of any measurable, significant improvement brought when going beyond SSE2.

https://board.eclipse.cx/viewtopic.php?t=669

Going by good old "DOMContentLoaded", Pale Moon looks like a bad deal if one values their time.

[moonbat]

Browser benchmarks don't tell the whole story anyway. Might as well have stuck with pre MMX instruction sets as well in that case

[UCyborg]

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of browser benchmarks. I forgot about D3Wasm, there I can tell, but that's a bit extreme example, just have a hard time telling when it comes to normal every day browsing.

There was a concern about certain newer CPUs not having AVX. What about SSE 4.1? Ablaze Floorp opts for SSE 4.1 optimizations specifically. No idea what's supposed to be better for a web browser. Found an older, but interesting thread on PCSX2 forum (PlayStation 2 emulator), in that case, whether SSE 4.1 or AVX/2 was better depended on another factor.

[Nuck-TH]

Compiler options used are downward inclusive - as in AVX includes itself and everything before it, including SSE2,3,4.1, etc.

[Moonchild]

just have a hard time telling when it comes to normal every day browsing.

Funny thing is that it's noticeable exactly there. There's performance improvements across the board with it.
As for "DOMContentLoaded" you're likely comparing apples and oranges. How fast a website's document tree loads isn't really a good measure especially if you're comparing browsers with privacy-flaunting prefetchers and predictors to us.

We do have several areas where we use SSE3.x and 4.x with manually-optimized paths, which additionally muddies the waters when it comes to benchmarking or comparing SSE2 and AVX in tight loops and the likes.

Compiler options used are downward inclusive - as in AVX includes itself and everything before it, including SSE2,3,4.1, etc.

Yes and no. AVX actually replaces SSE in a good number of places. But it is true that the capabilities of SSE at the hardware level is implied when AVX is in use, and a compiler can make its determination to use one or the other.

[Nuck-TH]

Yes and no. AVX actually replaces SSE in a good number of places. But it is true that the capabilities of SSE at the hardware level is implied when AVX is in use, and a compiler can make its determination to use one or the other.

Why no? In GCC -march=x86-64-v3 is just a shorthand that includes optimization options like -mavx -mavx2 -msse3 and etc older ones. Idk how my phrasing was unclear.

[Moonchild]

Maybe I misunderstood. At a technical level, a compiler with AVX enabled can opt to completely not use SSE instructions; while previous compiler options would just use the later ones in addition to older SSE instruction sets. That's what I meant.

[UCyborg]

Maybe my instance is too bogged down with extensions or rather their config. Like all that GUI CSS from CuteButtons and my tab bar being always full (thought most tabs are unloaded). I'd have to take time try out different config, but my workplace isn't the best for that, heh.

I suppose I had in mind that Ablaze Floorp goes up to SSE 4.1.

Code: Select all

-TP -Zc:sizedDealloc- -D_HAS_EXCEPTIONS=0 -Gy -Zc:inline -Gw -D_SILENCE_TR1_NAMESPACE_DEPRECATION_WARNING -GR- -Z7 -O2 -Qvec -w -clang:-ftree-vectorize -clang:-msse3 -clang:-mssse3 -clang:-msse4.1 -clang:-mtune=haswell -Oy

Not that it helps me at home, Phenom II is an unfortunate series that doesn't have either, only obscure SSE4A.

[Mike_Walsh]

33.5 is uploaded and autoupdate will eventually roll out as well

Cheers, Nuck-TH. Working well here on this ridiculous, modern but "AVX-less" Pentium G5400..!

Much appreciated, mate.


Mike.