My next Workstation

[Dotan Cohen]

On 8 July 2010 20:13, Preston Hagar <prestonh at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, AMD and Intel's use the same instruction set, and are completely
> compatible.
>
> Basically, as a little background info, Intel created the instruction
> set for the "x86" 32-bit processors and licensed it to AMD to use for
> their processors.  AMD created the instruction set for 64-bit
> processors "AMD64" and licensed it to Intel for their 64-bit
> processors.  That is why when you download Ubuntu ISOs, you will see
> i686 (Intel 32-bit instruction set) and AMD64 (AMD 64-bit instruction
> set) "versions"  For 64 bit Intel processors, you would still use the
> AMD64 download, because they use the AMD64 instructions set.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Preston
>

That is mostly true, but each processor has it's own features that the
other doesn't have, and processor-specific optimizations. Ubuntu, so
far as I know, compiles for generic hardware but if the user were to
recompile his own software than he might be able to benchmark a
difference. Nothing a desktop user would feel in the real world,
though, in my opinion.

The OP might want to take a look at Swiftfox, a Firefox build specific
to each processor.


-- 
Dotan Cohen

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