On Sat, Feb 14, 2004 at 12:00:48AM -0600, Ken Fuchs wrote: > >It's not a huge performance advantage, and if you're really that concerned > >about it, apt-get source foo; rpmbuild --rebuild --target i686 foo.src.rpm > > If there's not a huge performance advantage why has Intel and AMD added > dozens of new operations to the base 80386 opcodes in current x86 > processor designs? Frankly, new Pentium 4 or Athlon code runs much > faster on a Pentium 4 or Athlon than the equivalent 80386 code does. Software has to be written to specificly take advantage of MMX, MMX2, 3dnow, etc. Some of the rest are only useful to the kernel (PAE/PSE36 for example), mtrr is something apps like mplayer and XF86 take advantage of. Again, there's not a huge difference for 90% of applications anyway, they spend most their time waiting for user input. Programs that can take advantage of optimizations usually are, the kernel, glibc, mplayer, etc. Randomly using optimization flags on all your software will lead to an unstable system with bugs that you simply can't find. -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list