[nzlug] Stupid question department

[Mark Foster]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Michael Adams wrote:

> Why are most builds still compiled for 80386 chips? These chips are from
> 1985, ancient history in computer terms. There has to be a simple
> answer. I can see the value of it for say an IPCop build but a desktop
> distro running the latest KDE or gnome just won't work on i386 chips.
>
> I beleive the advent of the 64bit architecture may see the demise of the
> i386 builds but it isn't going to happen fast. Many projects are really
> struggling with the rewrite for the 64bit build (OO.o and Firefox among
> them).

Short answer is that the i386 platform is the all-compatible 32 bit 
architecture.

I don't think we'll see 64bit builds as commonplace untill 32 bit 
processors are largely off the market.

Most major distros have higher spec (i586 etc) builds available, but i386 
remains the baseline to which all other variations are backwardly 
compatible...

Mark.