The real performance gains were just about the -i386 to pentium jump; a bunch of distros only shipped the most compatible code and didn’t use the newer instruct

The real performance gains were just about the -i386 to pentium jump; a bunch of distros only shipped the most compatible code and didn’t use the newer instructions. I always found that optimizing for size and using the exact march/mcpu worked nicely. But the biggest part I liked was being able to turn off features I didn’t need (like mpg123 in a headless server NOT pulling in X).