Changing the default 32-bit x86 arch for Fedora 12

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Jerry James<loganjerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Bill Nottingham<notting at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Not that it matters for Fedora, but I doubt many people are paying
>> $whatever_the_price_of_RHEL_is to run on a 6, 7, 10-year old machine. And
>> RHEL 5 only supports (base) i686 or greater already.
>
> You know, I haven't seen anybody object to the "i686" part yet.  All
> of the objections, as far as I have noticed, have been to the "+ SSE2"
> part.

I didn't raise that point because it was beaten pretty thoroughly in
the past thread.

The i686 vs i586 difference is cmov.

Is dropping hardware worth this instruction? I suggested some
benchmarking and demonstrated that it's a very small improvement for
Theora. I'm not sure if anyone got around to testing freetype,
firefox, or any of the other couple CPU heavy desktop apps.

It would probably be most interesting to perform that test on the
x86-only ATOM, since I can see CMOV being a bigger win on an in-order
CPU.

(I can't personally protest: I think all the x86 stuff I have has CMOV).