2 ms·
> Only mingw AFAIK ships i686 packages (with simd support), all others stay in the safe i386 camp still, without simd support. Conflating i686 vs i386 with SIM
by wtallis 3y ago
> Only mingw AFAIK ships i686 packages (with simd support), all others stay in the safe i386 camp still, without simd support.
Conflating i686 vs i386 with SIMD vs no SIMD is wrong. The Pentium Pro was an i686 processor with no SIMD, and the Pentium 2 was its successor that added MMX — a very narrowly-useful integer-only SIMD extension (which was first introduced on the pre-i686 Pentium MMX). Floating point SIMD (SSE) didn't show up until the Pentium 3 (on the Intel side; AMD's 3DNow was earlier but was eventually dropped).
It's certainly reasonable to enable SSE and SSE2 when building for 32-bit x86 these days, but calling that target "i686" doesn't accurately describe the hardware requirements.