Will Woods wrote:
On Sun, 2009-04-05 at 23:01 +0100, psmith wrote:
i completely understand the reasoning to move i365 up to i586, but why on earth restrict i686 capable processors to the i586 instruction sets?
Again: the only difference between i586 and i686 is the CMOV family of instructions, which are generally *slower* than the i586 version.
You can read Linus' detailed explanation here: http://ondioline.org/mail/cmov-a-bad-idea-on-out-of-order-cpus
Building for i686 gives *no* real performance benefit[1], but breaks support for i586 machines - Via C7-based netbooks, AMD Geode (e.g. the OLPC XO-1), and so on.
-w
[1] except on in-order CPUs like Atom and the original Pentium
well i understand why fedora stuck with downgrading to i586 now, saving work by only having to compile 1 kernel version for the x86 arch (plus to keep the olpc folks happy i suppose) and while linus is undoubtably a clever guy i think intel know their arch better than anyone, and if cmov was a performance hit it would be removed ;) looks like i'll need to compile my own i686 for my aspire one as the i586 kernel in F11 beta is showing a noticeable performance hit over F10 i686 :(
phil