Pentium II 233 MMX = i686? i586? x86?
 

I'm about to get the stage3 tarball to continue my installation with Gentoo, but now that I'm presented with a choice on what tarball to download, I realize that I'm not sure what my arch is! It's a Pentium II 233 MMX in a Dell Inspiron 3200 laptop. I can choose between x86, i586, and i686 ... what should I download?

Hi,

Not a pro by any means, but I believe you have i686, there was old 386, then the 486, then the earily pentium's 100mhz or less, I think. These were the i586, and then the whole mmx instruction set came out I believe, I could be wrong and anything after this is i686.

When you download an image like blahblah.i386.iso it means that I was built to run bare minimum on this archtecture, like with no xserver or the like.

I believe you are safe to download the i686, but you may want to check with someone else, as a gentoo install is a long process and you probably don't want to do it twice. Also I looked up this info quite a while ago and get easily confused.

I believe I just typed something like i686 info or i386 history into google and it give you the whole bang.

Here you go.

x86 refers to a processor architecture (a processor family). In 1978 Intel released a new 16 bit processor the 8086 wich was the first of this family of processors it was followed by the 80186 and the 80286 16 bit processors and the 80386, 80486, Pentium (80586) and Pentium Pro (80686) processors, Intel stop to use numbers to name their processors because they cannot be 'trademarks' and other manufacturers sell processors with the same 'number names'. A little history: (from my memory)
- 1978, 8086 first Intel 16 bit processor. There is a version with 8 bit data bus named 8088. It can address 1MB of memory.
- 80186 small improvements over the original, there is a 80188 one with 8 bit data bus too. Not much use in PCs at that time, but they are still manufactured for embedded systems.
- 1982?, 80286 advanced 16 bit processor two working moded "real" and "protected". In 'real' model they act just as a fast 8086. In 'protected' mode they can address up to 16MB of physical memory and up to 4GB of virtual memory.

- 1987?, 80386 first 32 bit Intel processor, it supports both 80286 work modes and adds a new one 'virtual 86'. In "protected" mode it can now address up to 4GB of physical and 64GB of virtual memory. A cheap version named 386SX with the data and address bus of a 80286 was introduced later due to the success of AMD 80286 @ 25 Mhz. processors.

- 1989?, 80486 advanced 32 bit 'pipelined' processor 5 stages capable of execute 1 instruction per cycle (theoretically), the first with an integrated floating point unit (FPU) they have 8/16KB of L1 cache and the 486DX/2 one was the first to use multipliers.
- 1993?, Pentium (80586) 'superscalar' processor, issues more than 1 instruction per cycle but it can not yield 2, it has a couple of 80486 pipelines and an improved floating point unit.

- 1995?, Pentium Pro (80686) 'hyperscalar' processor capable of execute 2 instructions per clock cycle, new CMOV instructions, L2 cache on the CPU package, support for PAE (increases the memory addresable range). base of the Pentium II and III processors.

- 2003, AMD 64 bit x86 compatible processors Athlon 64, Athlon FX and Opteron. Seems that this venerable processor architecture has still a long life!!

"i386 the os will work on a 386 or better?"
Of course all x86 processors are upward complatible, so a 80686 can run code written for a 8086 processor (the oposite isn't true) and of course they can run 80386 32 bit code.

Hope that helps

Ah yeah, you're right. I looked around a bit more to assure your information and anything beyond the Pentium Pro is an i686. Thank you for your help!

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedo.../msg01258.html
Pentium II is i686. (i686 refers to the instruction set: )
Pentium I and Pentium Pro is i586

Great read!! Thank you very much!