On Tuesday February 25 2003 12:27 pm, flacycads wrote:
> My main complaint (really about the only one) about Mandrake is
> that they apparently refuse to issue an Athlon-XP optimized version
> for retail sales, or download. However, at least you can rebuild
> the srpms yourself. But really, how hard can it be to recompile the
> entire distro for different architectures like Gentoo does, and
> post the iso's with an "unsupported" disclaimer, if need be? IMO,
> they will loose a lot of users if they don't. Otherwise, Mandrake
> is a great distro, but the bottom line is a lot of users won't even
> consider distros that only put out i586 optimized versions (or
> less) anymore. After all, fewer and fewer users are even running
> i586 hardware these days. Mandrake needs to get with the times.
Yes, the popular perception is that i686 has got to be better than
i586, and compiled for athlon must be even better .... no? Real
world is that neither i686 or athlon compiling provides anything but
somethin to do if you're bored. Could even reduce performance. At
least that's been my experience for some years now (Tbird/VIA
kt133a). Many others have reported the same. Texstar and a few
others compiled almost 95% of a recent Mandrake release for athlon,
and gave up cause it was no better, introduced more problems. Gentoo
has actually been shown to be no faster tested against i586 Mandrake.
Often slower, from what I've read of others experience.
The source rpms are available for everything and you can always
build 'em yourself. OTOH, how could a distro like Mandrake possibly
compile for each and every cpu and motherboard chipset combination?
Specially since some of the most recent cpu's, grossly overstate
their capabilities, and chipsets vary widely in their design and
performance. Examples, the recent fad of Via C(yrix) 3 processors
that report to be i686, but are really not even fully compliant i586
cpu's, retaining many i486 characteristics and limitations. There's
also the P4's with their poor FPU capability, and that still don't
have decent motherboard chipsets to run on.
If ya just gotta squeeze out a little more zip ... overclock ;)
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
