A new CachyOS snapshot for July 2024 is out today with various improvements and some exciting new features, especially for AMD users, as well as the usual bug fixes and other changes to improve your experience.
Starting with this release, CachyOS will automatically enable a software repository on new installations that will be used to provide the best performance for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 machines. In addition, the ISO now features automatic architecture checks for the Zen 4/Zen 5 repository and CachyOS’s hardware detection tool (chwd) received support for AMD GPUs for better detection of official ROCm-supported GPUs.
I feel like software that actually needs those CPU features will have it implemented their own way anyway to probe for and use it (since it seems like nobody but cachy or custom kernel runs anything but V1)
Software implementations of those features is often slower, and runtime checking can often be too expensive compared to the gains.
Gentoo offers x86_64-v4 binary builds too.
There was a proposal for Fedora too, though it was ultimately rejected.
Ultimately the gains right now seem to be only 1-3%, though that might also be because there’s not much demand for these kind of optimizations. If more distros enable them they might become more widespread and the benefits might increase too. It’s a chicken-egg problem though.