Dylan wrote:
i686 (or IA64) are for the new 64bit chips. <er, someone else...?>
Actually, i686 meand PII or better, i586 is the original pentium. I usually compile -march=i686 for a P4.
I have a PII 300 and SuSE 8.1. Which should I choose, given a choice?
the i586 - are likely to run a bit faster at least since they're compiled for the pentium class, but i386 will run just fine. You might find that the dependencies are different occasionally. i686/IA64 will not run on a PII
but i686 will run a little faster still. In practice, you can use any of the three. I guess the i586/i686 distinction arises because the Pentium II actually has a smaller set of instructions internally than the Pentium and some complex Pentium instructions have to be converted to the PII RISC code equivalent before being executed. Compiling code in pure i686 code avoids these runtime conversions. -- JDL