3 ms·

How? There isn't even a 4 or an x in the name.

• hakfoo 3y ago
  It definitely reminds me more of "x86-64", the name used on early publications before they decided to brand it (AMD64, Intel calling it EM64T or something, and eventually x64 appearing as a shorthand). You've got the "86" and a 6, and unlike i386 or i486, "686" never had significant currency as a "real" chip name. I feel like "i586" and "i686" are sort of a hairball logistically. I can recall a friend in the late 1990s whose forum signature boasted having a "686" overclocked to 262MHz-- an AMD K6. While we sort of understand i586 to mean Pentium, and i686 to be PPro/PII/PIII and beyond, you can make cases for the non-Intel Pentium-class CPUs to be anywhere from i386 (NexGen Nx586-- where's the FPU),to i686 (something like a K6-IiI+ is clearly more advanced than, say, the original i586 Pentium 60, although not necessarily matching PPro additions one-for-one) Going completely on a further tangent, it feels like we stopped awarding architecture tiers like that. There were definitely new instructions in some of the later-generation parts, why didn't the Pentium III with SSE, for example, become an 'i786' tier? Why is there only one 'amd64'? Guessing the overall strategy is that modern code feature-detects and compilers build a binary with multiple code paths-- something that will run grudgingly on a Pentium Pro or original Socket 940 Opteron, but will pick more efficient code paths on a more recent CPU. Although, wasn't that sort of the promise of things like Gentoo-- by building things yourself, you could make a hyper-lean system knowing it only needed to run on the exact hardware you had? I'd expect a marginal performance uptick, just because you'd be avoiding checks and branches related to feature selection and smaller binary sizes, but it doesn't seem like there's a clear consensus it carries its weight.