Re: How to make all build using --cpu=pentium?

[George Bonser <grep@shorelink.com>]

On Sat, 1 Jan 2000, aphro wrote:

> Very little is gained by recompiling *everything* when optmized for
> pentium.  Firstly the pentium optmization  does not optimize for Pentium
> II or Pentium III or pentium pro or k6 or k6-2 or k6-3 or athlon.  Also
> very few applications show a noticable performance boost when compiling
> with pentium optimizations on. 

This has been my experiance as well. You also must be careful what you
compile if you want to try alternative compilers such as pgcc. Don't try
it on the Linux kernel, for example, as it will likely create some really
weird and hard to identify errors.

I suppose some things like graphics, audio, and video could make good use
of MMX optimizations but there really aren't any good standard ways of
doing that either.

There HAVE been some people that have improved things considerably but it
take a lot of work.

Best option is to probably leave things alone unless one has the time and
energy to troubleshoot possible problems at a very low ( machine
language ) level.