P2 CPU "class, " but 386/486 ISA "core" are commonplace -- WAS: i586/686 glibc/kernel

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 09:37:43PM -0400, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Now AMD has licensed National Semi's Geode products.  The Geode are the
> Cyrix M2 core, which are Pentium ISA.  These are quickly commonplace.

The Geode isnt an M2 core, and its not licensed. AMD bought Geode outright
from NS. If you look at the timings the Geode is much more a 486 with extra
instructions.

> But AMD was is still selling its E86/SCLAN series too (and was its
> _only_ product for awhile), which kicks some serious butt at 133MHz,
> with lots of on-board peripherials.

Thats 486 with buggy hw emulation.

> support.  But underneath, the _majority_ of STMicro products are i486
> ISA.

486..

> But for plain Jane x86, there is little sense to break i386 ISA
> compatibility.  Yes, _assume_ the "performance/memory/disk" equivalent
> of a Pentium Pro/II or higher.  But leave the instruction set
> compatibility (ISA) at i386 -- please, for Fedora adoption sake.

Every example you give is 486 or higher ISA, as are the others you
missed that I am aware of - SiS55x for example. Going 386->486 makes a 
really big difference.