On Dec 14, 2010, at 1:14 PM, Ross Walker wrote:
It actually makes more sense to call the distro x86, better to peg it to a particular architecture then a CPU release.
Then one has x86 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit).
Sure there's an appealing symmetry with "x86" <-> "x86_64". The problem is that the names keep changing for marketing and technical reasons. Even "i686" and "i586" are mostly meaningless jargon. E.g. the linux kernel chose to start returning "i686" as a generic, not specific, and rely on precise details in /proc/cpuinfo years and years ago.
But this is all decided by Redhat, CentOS is just a RHEL recompilation with the intellectual property stripped out.
Nothing decided by RedHat (or Intel) prevents using "ia32e" or "i786" as a cpu architecture identifier in CentOS.
It's a "Principle of Least Surprise" wrto users that continues to use "i386" as an identifier.
73 de Jeff