On Sat, Sep 06, 2003 at 02:02:56PM -0400, Chris Kloiber wrote: ... a lot of stuff that I agree with, but can't resist adding a few additional comments. > The common arches are: > > i386 The 80386 cpu, a least common denominator of sorts. All of the > higher numbered common processors include the i386 instruction set. > Most rpm packages are "i386". > > i486 Almost nobody makes rpms tuned for this chip, it was a short lived > stepping stone to the Pentium. The other significant difference is that an i386 will generally lack a floating point unit, which is one reason why there are few if any floating-point operations in the base Linux kernel. Floating point arithmatic on an i386 requires either an external FPU chip, or trap handlers to emulate the floating point instructions in software. I tend to think of the i486 as an i386 with a built-in FPU. If there are any other major differences I can't remember what they are. > ia64 The Intel 64 bit processors, called Itanium. Sometimes also derisively called the Itanic. > They can run some programs make for i386 and up, but *slowly*. Are you sure about this? I thought that the ia64 was a completely different architecture than the ia32, with no backward compatability. > amd64 Also temporarily known as "x86_64". These are the new AMD > Opterons, and soon the "Athlon 64" Noteworthy because these are 64-bit CPUs with full backward compatibility with the ia32 architecture. The reports I've seen also indicate that the amd64 CPUs can run ia32 binaries faster than the fastest current ia32 processors. It looks like AMD has a real winner on their hands with this series of CPUs. -- John Kodis Goddard Space Flight Center kodis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Greenbelt, Maryland, USA Phone: 301-286-7376 Fax: 301-286-1771 -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
