AFAIK, there have been mixed results which depend on which version of gcc you're running. While reading on the topic a few months back, the general consensus seemed to be that in general i686 (which is what I'm compiling with) actually resulted in slightly slower performance in some areas but this WAS expected to improve as gcc evolved. I think it also yields somewhat longer compile times, again this is expected to only improve.
In any case, I don't think there is noticeable difference in choosing either for most desktop environments. I think of more importance is the march flag (which I've got set to "pentium-m") which are supposed to include power saving optimizations. Cheers Marek On Monday 19 December 2005 12:34, Visser, Martin wrote: > All, > > I just "googled" for "benchmark performance linux kernel i386 versus > i686" and found nothing of any import. I am just wondering if anyone has > bothered doing this. It would be nice to know what the tradeoff is > between performance and convenience of not needing to know the CPU > architecture. Using multi-CD distros I would also choose the closest > matching kernel, but for my Ubuntu installs I haven't bothered. > > Martin -- - Marek W -- 2b | !2b Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
