What this term stands for?
 

What does i386, i586, i686, iathlon stands for....If you have an AMD processor you'll need to have a packages iAthlon...?!?....Is there any guys could give me a basic information about this....Sorry for the lame question, but iam practically curious...I even could not sleep with these terms flying all over my head? Thanks

No ... that basically means iXXX won't run on
an older machine ... if you have a Pentium II
a i386 will work happily. If you have a 386/33
a i586 package won't work.
Athlon is only different in this respect because it
has a few extensions that an Intel CPU wouldn't.

I'm not keeping too close an eye on the CPU market,
so I'm not sure what current intel CPU's instructions
a current athlon can actually do


Cheers,
Tink

i386 means the package is compiled for generic i386 based machines. Which includes all 486's, Pentiums, Pentium Pro's, Athlons, Pentium 4's, and anything else with the x86 architecture.

i486 packages mean they have some optimizations that mean that will only work on i486 and higher (so you are out of luck if you still have that old 386 kicking around).

i586 is Pentium 1 class machines (and AMD K5's) and higher

i686 is Pentium II/III class machines and higher

ect.

Another point to add... most distributions use the -mcpu flag to compile for a specific chip and not the -march flag. This means the compiled code will work better on the specific arcitecture, but will also work on other generic archs.

Thanks...for the tidbits...i'll be able to sleep now...