Adam Williamson wrote: > The problem is that optimising for your system sounds all l33t and cool > but really, it's not, it's a huge waste of time. The only meaty > difference between i586 and the later processors so far as GCC cares are > the additional instruction sets, MMX, SSE and 3D Now! These are > particularly useful only to a tiny minority of applications. For the > vast majority of applications you'll see no real increase in speed at > all between compiling for i586 and compiling for athlon-xp. Don't start > crying "gentoo!", because if you get speed boosts via gentoo it's > generally by using very aggressive compilation options, not by > targetting your own processor architecture. For the minority of > applications for which compiling for MMX, in particular, is useful - > basically, media encoders - there will be a system of alternative > libraries, as Austin explained.
The problem is theoretically that's all cool and sounds right, but then you go rebuild the major parts of your system for i686 and you notice a significant increase in interactive performance. Note I mean recompiling SRPMS on Mandrake, not switching to Gentoo.
