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Fedora Core 4 Test 1 slipsFedora Core 4 Test 1 slipsPosted Feb 24, 2005 7:36 UTC (Thu) by shalem (subscriber, #4062)In reply to: Fedora Core 4 Test 1 slips by jd Parent article: Fedora Core 4 Test 1 slips
Please people stop whining about having optimised packages for your cpu, does windows come with 6 different versions?
And if you whine at least know what you're talking about, the i686 family started with the pentium pro, then came along the pentium 2 which was a pentium pro with the internal cache removed and mmx added, the p3 was again just a souped up pentium pro, this is the REAL i686 family.
The p4 otoh is a whole new design and the new p4's (presscots) the ones with the model numbers are again a whole new design (yet still called p4, to hide that they are actually slower then the old p4's), this is for some reason still called the i686 family afaik.
And the pentium mobile is a pentium pro based design with quite some changes to it, so basicly again a new beast.
So we have 4 different beasts to deal with (counting only intel):
Also you really need to make a difference between which instructions are used and for which cpu the code is optimised. All binaries in FC3 are optimised (instructionscheduling wise) for the (pre-prescot) P4, this is doen because this is the most widely used processor now a days and because P4 optimised code also runs pretty good on Ppro/2/3. AMD cpu's really don't mind that much what you feed them, they perform descent with just about any code.
Beside the optimal instruction scheduling, you also have difference between cpu models in available instructions, this is where the i386 and i686 rpm's come into play. i386 rpms use only 386 instructions (needed for via epia systems), but their (much more important) instruction scheduling is optimised for the pre-prescot P4.
For the few cases where the few normal instructions only available in newer CPU's do make a difference there are seperate RPM's.
Programs which benefit from special instructions like mmx and sse usually contain both normal and mmx/sse versions of the code in question and determine the availability of mmx/sse runtime.
Anyways this discussion has been had over and over on the fedoral-devel mailinglist, and the default answer is, if you believe optimalisation for your specific cpu helps then:
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