[CentOS-devel] Re: CentOS-5 on i586

Scott Silva ssilva at sgvwater.com
Tue Apr 8 15:59:14 UTC 2008


on 4-7-2008 4:48 PM Scott Silva spake the following:
> on 4-7-2008 11:06 AM Manuel Tuthill spake the following:
>>> It looks like the Geode is i586 but with cmov functionality.
>>>
>>> It strikes me as odd that AMD would build a 586 processor with cmov
>>> instructions, but also build a 686 class without that instruction set.
>>> Makes
>>> me wonder if it was an engineering snafu that was too costly to fix for
>>> the
>>> quantity they expected to sell.
>>
>>
>> Wow, that seems very odd. cmov was only part of the i686 instruction 
>> set so
>> this still wouldn't work with a native i686 distribution right?
>>
>> BTW it was VIA not AMD who made the "engineering snafu" on the VIA C3 
>> class
>> chips. Rather than being a "snafu" they interpreted the IA32 
>> specifications
>> a little to literary, the CMOV is an optional instruction, but as fair 
>> as I
>> understand if it's optional it shouldn't be used at all (since there 
>> is no
>> guarantee that it will be available to all i686 cpu's) but since every 
>> other
>> i686 class cpu had the instruction when they were doing GCC it got left.
> 
> I totally forgot the timeline. VIA did make these chips long before the 
> AMD buyout.

Sorry for this obvious bull. Long late day, and no sleep. What was I thinking?
VIA is not ATI. ATI was bought by AMD.
Too many three letter companies and not enough coffee!!  ;-P




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