Re: What does i386 exactly mean?
On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> On Monday January 31 2005 15:21, andras.lorincz@gmail.com wrote:
> > The debian packages contain in their names i386. That means, as far as I
> > know, that these programs are compiled to be able to run on at least on
> > intel 386 processors. But does it also mean that if are run on newer
> > machines, they run slower because don't exploit the capabilities of the
> > newer processors?
...
> There are some rare cases where a customized build will offer an advantage,
> all of them CPU intensive programs like raytracers, graphics applications,
> A/V codecs and games. Usually simply building a package from the debian
> sources will apply the correct processor-specific extensions, but it doesn't
> hurt to look through the debian/rules file before a build.
somebody should do a whitepaper on it and compare some standard benchmarks
with *.i386 vs compiled on the host machine with all the whiz-bang
instructions of that host cpu
- fp based apps will probably benefit from recompiling for AMD cpus
( that'd be mostof your graphics and compute intensive apps )
- it's amazing that the itty-bitty instructions are still around
when all others of the same era died off eons ago
- and if you wanna go superfast, and need that extra 10% - 20%
system performance improvement, you can always code in assy,
but you have to be smarter than "gcc" to do it right/better/faster
c ya
alvin
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