Tom, I might be wrong, but as I understand it, that "recent" Mandrake release you're referring to was done before the new gcc came out with the better athlon specific optimizing flags. The most recent athlon rpms indeed perform better than the i586 versions on athlon hardware.
As for the Gentoo/Mandrake i586 comparison, there was a long discussion on the Gentoo forum about this, and I believe it was specifically about kde performance. The consensus seemed to be that Mandrake is prelinking kde, and at that time, Gentoo didn't offer that, thus Gentoo seemed no faster running kde. At least that was the theory. In any case, IMHO since these new cpus have significanly different and enhanced architecture, and certainly much better performance, it makes sense that optimizing specifically for them would enhance overall performance. Anyone who dual boots with windows on the same hardware knows that windows performance is noticably better than Linux, and that this is most likely due to the highly x86 optimized Intel compiler. Given that, it's going to be hard to convince me that trying to optimize Linux and gcc for newer cpus is not worth the trouble. However, I'll keep an open mind on the subject, and I'm certainly not an expert. Robert Crawford On Tuesday 25 February 2003 05:16 pm, Greg Meyer wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Tuesday 25 February 2003 04:52 pm, Tom Brinkman wrote: > > Yes, the popular perception is that i686 has got to be better than > > i586, and compiled for athlon must be even better .... no? Real > > world is that neither i686 or athlon compiling provides anything but > > somethin to do if you're bored. Could even reduce performance. At > > least that's been my experience for some years now (Tbird/VIA > > kt133a). Many others have reported the same. Texstar and a few > > others compiled almost 95% of a recent Mandrake release for athlon, > > and gave up cause it was no better, introduced more problems. Gentoo > > has actually been shown to be no faster tested against i586 Mandrake. > > Often slower, from what I've read of others experience. > > I would agree on optimizations up to athlon-xp. Since GCC3.2 came out, I > have optimized XFree86 and KDE for athlon-xp and there is a noticeable > improvement in the responsiveness of the gui. Other big packages like > OpenOffice.org and GNOME would benefit too I am sure. For most other > stuff, you're right, even athlon-xp makes no noticeable difference and > could introduce instabilities. For anything optimized below athlon-XP, I > have not noticed any difference - -- > Greg > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQE+W+tXGu5uuMFlL5MRAt8vAJ0dk26sMndr4XXsAHlvgpuNwJbFIwCeKtRs > abx0qtjCvsrMTlboyotArwg= > =rzuP > -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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