What is diffrence between I386 and I486?
 

Trying to figure out what kernel to compile for slackware10.2 but I don't know what the difference is between I386 and I486 hardware systems. Thankyou

Each are intel processors and the predecessors to intel pentium class cpu's. Unless you have a very old machine, you likely have neither.
if you have a newer CPU (P4) you likely need to look for i686

cheers:)

Virtually all computers you will be able to find today are i686 (Pentium II and newer)

I have soyo mobo sy6ba+IV, 100PC, PIII 600 copermine, 639mb ram, old pci yamaha sound card,plextor cdrw 8/4/32A, Asus cdrom 52Xmax, GeForce 2gts 32mb. Sorry I should have posted this with my question. Thankyou

hm, i have a I686 running on a pentiumII 400mhz, am i suposed to use I386 then?

No. As said, P2 is i686... Pentium pro and up afaik...

PII + = i686

I'm pretty sure the pentium pro was the first i686... then on up to the pIII in the intel line...

You're right, amosf; Pentium Pro and up.

Thankyou everyone...

Yeah so this makes me curious.
If I type "uname -rm" I get the response:
2.6.8-2-386 i686
I installed the 386 kernel package from Debian, but am running on a 686. Does this lead to problems?
Must b I'm a :newbie:

EDIT: Yeah that's probably kind of a dumb question. I'll just read up on it and test out the 686 version to see what happens.

Well there is a difference for all the models 386/486/586/686
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...icroprocessors
Just a nice little reference i found

Newbie so not sure if I'm in the right thread.
Installed RH9 2 weeks ago. Just sorted out registration problem with up2date and did update. Have an i686 but it seems that I've somehow updated to i386 kernel. Does that make sense? Anyway, is this going to cause a problem? Should I try and locate a kernel for i686 and update again? or should I take this opportunity and opt for another distribution like Slackware 10.2?

i386 refers to the base system that the code will run on. Anything above that will run it just fine.

I'm now convinced that running the 386 kernel on my 686 machine was causing a problem which is discussed in another thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362259

The 80x86 is model instruction. Every model that comes out includes new instructions and new ways of handling the data with out hurting backward compatiblity. An 80386 instruction can be run on a 80386 and up to a 80786. Everybody mistaken Pentium 4 as 80686 but they are actually 80786. If you compile the code on Pentium 4 using 80786 model, the program will not work on 80686 and lower. The name Pentium is an 80586 because the prefix Penti means five and um means powerful (I think).

No, the 80386 code will not hurt an 80686 system.

Wrong, I have never had any problems running 80386 on a 80686 processor. It is actually the controller and faulty hard drive. Maxtors hard drives are very problematic drives. I recommend Hitachi or Western Digital. Also in some systems mult-mode may have to be enabled by the kernel to fix the problem.

The difference?
 

Hi,

My first PC was a 386DX-40. As I remember, the 486 had four processor instructions that the 386 did not have. These four (IIRC) were combinations of 386 instructions, so what had taken 2 instructions on a 386 now only required one (and may be faster with just one).

Intel's 386 had 275,000 transistors, AMD's had 280K. I've heard you could push AMD's 40 MHz chip up to 80 MHz without damage, but don't quote me on that.

And please don't ever use one of those 486 SXLC or 486 DXLC chips, unless you know what you are doing. They do NOT have all the CPU registers that a true 486 has -- so if your program wishes to use all the registers of a 486 to store stuff, the program will crash!

So to answer your question, running a 386 program on a 486 (or higher) may mean the program uses more instructions to get the job done because it doesn't issue one of those four "combined" instructions, or any instructions that the Pentium, AMD K5, K6, or later chips know how to carry out.

Also "i386" can be used to mean "Intel / AMD Pentium-class instructions" to differentiate the files from Linux for Apple PowerPC (PPC). I suspect that Mandrake (or others) may have used "i386" this way (around Mandrake 8.0 or 8.2).

Hope this helps.