Skip to content

Why have optimized builds been removed?

Jump to bottom
mr. m edited this page Dec 23, 2024 · 3 revisions

For windows and linux, zen used to have the option to download optimized builds. These builds contained different set of optimizations such as having AVX2 instructions, fast math optimizations, etc... The reason they've got removed is because of the following:

  1. Optimized version doesn't mean it's faster: PGO builds aren't working on optimized versions because clang doesn't seem to handle them correctly, leading to a crash and therefor we can't even build optimized builds if we want PGO and LTO included. These instructions can also use more power consumption and it's not really great for heavy parallel computations.

  2. AVX2 isn't supported everywhere: There are still many computers that can't run AVX2 instructions, making them to give up on zen before they even tried it

In conclusion, having optimized build is not really worth it, specially if we want to have PGO + LTO, because having them doesn't necessarily mean zen will run faster or smoother, in some cases, it can be the exact opposite.

P.S. all optimized builds will be automatically updated to generic starting from version 1.0.2-b.4

Download zen

Clone this wiki locally