Quote:
Originally posted by KobyBoy
Actually it is. Take for instance the chips from the Pentium family. The original Pentium was considers top of the line when it came out; it blew away the 486. Then along came the Pentium II, the Pentium III and now the Pentium 4. The difference between these chips is not just the speed at which they run at but also the architechture of the chip itself. While they are all built on the same x86 core they are vastly different.
If you install your linux distro from a binary package then all the packages have to be compiled so that they will run on all Pentium chips. So while the binary package will run on both the original Pentium and also a moden day Pentium 4 it will not take advantage of the moden day Pentium 4's features hence it will not run as fast as it could. Now if you compile something from source and you tell the compile that you have a Pentium 4 and adjust your compile setting accordingly your binary will only run on a Pentirum 4 or better (hence breaking backward compatability) but also at the same time run faster because it can take advantage of all of the chips features. I've pesonally experienced this and also there are many comparissons available on the net about this.
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Ok, you're right. All binary distros do all their compiling on 486s, and Gentoo is faster because using -O99 and -mpentiumpro opt settings will give you at least a 50% performance increase. I wonder if funroll-loops will accept your quote for their site.