On Mon, 27 Aug 2001 17:04, Anguo wrote:
> Michael D. Viron banged on their keyboard and produced the following
> arrangement of letters:
> - >Is there such a thing as a "Linux Mandrake 8.1 i586 edition"?
> -
> - Anguo,
> -
> - By default, Mandrake's distributions are built for i586--the 'i586
> edition' - would be extraneous.
> -
> - Michael
>
> I guess you meant to write:
> "By default, Mandrake's distributions are built for i586;
> the 'i686 edition' would be extraneous."
>
> Since Bill helped me to acertain that my Duron CPU is a i686, and since I
> am running the "default" Mandrake 8.0 version for i586, (and since 8.1
> would allow me to print chinese, which is not possible with 8.0), I guess I
> should be looking forward to upgrade to the Mandrake 8.1 i686 edition.
>
> But what's the difference?
i386 = intel 80386 and compatible.
i486 = intel 80486 and compatible.
i586 = anything built on intel Pentium technology, including Pentium MMX.
i686 = anything built on intel Pentium Pro technology, including Pentium
II/III and Celeron.
The Pentium 4 is an entirely new chip, and for the moment has no specific
compilers. Since x86 chips are backwards-compatible, you can use i686
packages.
AMD Athlons and Durons have their own architecture (and even their own
compilation options in gcc), but are also compatible with i686. The AMD K6
series is Pentium-class, and so is 1586 compatible.
> Does this mean that my current distro doesn't use the full capacity of my
> cpu? Would the system run faster/better with the i686 edition?
Usually the speed boost isn't large enough to make a real difference. That
doesn't stop me from compiling all my packages for i686, though :-)
> thanks
>
> Anguo
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://wwww.mandrakestore.com
