Switching CPU question

[Lord Tallon]

I thought I'd ask first to save myself some time searching on the web...

Anybody know if switching out my Athlon T-bird 900 for an XP chip will cause Red Hat 8 any problems?

Just curious, because I've performed this operation under Windows, but never on a linux box...

-Brock aka Lord Tallon

[fancypiper]

I don't believe it will as Redhat isn't optimized for a specific cpu. It's based on i386, I think.

[bwkaz]

As long as your motherboard supports the XP chips, it won't cause problems for any OS. Even if your OS was optimized for a Tbird, it would run on an XP processor.

AFAIK, the XP processors didn't even add any new instructions, other than SSE. The major difference between programs optimized -march=athlon-tbird and -march=athlon-xp is mostly instruction scheduling. Which means that you could even switch backwards, unless your program used SSE. It might run slower on the different CPU, but it should still run.