# Athlon Confusion Question

## Jestic008

Allot of the time i see optimizatin for "Athlon" and "Athlon TB (thunderbird)" tags for CFLAGS or links like the gentoo stage files ... Some are optimized just for Athlon and some say Athlon TB. 

Currently I am concerned about the Stage 2 and Stage 3 images that say Athlon and Athlon TB.

My processor is a 1.2G AMD Duron. 

Which should i get that will work best? 

the regular stage one that just says athlon or the one that says athlon tb? 

Thanks.

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## wilbertnl

I have an AMD Duron 800MHz and I use athlon-tb with success.

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## dioxmat

depends of the duron. I believe old durons must use athlon-tbird, and the newer athlon. not sure though. I'm using athlon-tbird on a duron 650 and it works quite well...

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## RagManX

I believe Athlon refers to the original slot based Athlon, and Athlon TBird refers to socket based Athlons and Durons.

RagManX

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## El_Presidente_Pufferfish

A 1.2Ghz Duron is based off the athlon-xp

so use that optimization

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## !k

This question is interesting... Is there a way to tell that information of you don't remember, short of opening the case and having a look?  I believe Athlon refers to the old school checkbook sized processors.

I guess you could always try the flags and see if they go...

Here is the cpuinfo for my Tbird, note it doesn't explicitly specify its a tbird.  Though I'm sure the model number, family, or stepping could be correlated?

```

kevin@kbox kevin $ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor       : 0

vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD

cpu family      : 6

model           : 4

model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor

stepping        : 2

cpu MHz         : 908.120

cache size      : 256 KB

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug         : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu             : yes

fpu_exception   : yes

cpuid level     : 1

wp              : yes

flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow

bogomips        : 1808.79

```

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## El_Presidente_Pufferfish

Athlon XP's can do SSE

Athlon TB's can't

Im not sure, but i think that Classic Athlons(slot) can't do 3dnow+

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## MidnightObsidian

I have a Duron 1.0GHz CPU, so judging by this post, I should use the AthlonXP set of instructions.  I'm wondering if there were any core changes / instruction set ammendments between the 1.0GHz and the 1.2GHz models.  How can I test to see if mine supports SSE?

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## rac

 *MidnightObsidian wrote:*   

> How can I test to see if mine supports SSE?

 

cat /proc/cpuinfo and look at the flags section.

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## Chickpea

What is SSE?

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## MidnightObsidian

 *rac wrote:*   

>  *MidnightObsidian wrote:*   How can I test to see if mine supports SSE? 
> 
> cat /proc/cpuinfo and look at the flags section.

 

Can I do that off of the bootable installation ISO?  I have everything set up in my system, but I'm having trouble getting GRUB to work with the "Promise Technology Inc. Ultra IDE Controller" to which my Gentoo drive is attached.  (See the thread here.)

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## !k

 *Chickpea wrote:*   

> What is SSE?

 

SSE means Streaiming SIMD Instructions.  SIMD is an acronym for Single Instruction Multiple Data.... meaning one instructions processes several data pieces in parallel.  I think a few special registers were added too.

Its kind of like how my mom got all of us together to yell at as in parallel, so she could get it done quicker with a single rant.

I'm a software guy who likes to stay several layers of abstraction above such things.  Think of it as multi-media enhancements to the aging x86 architechture.

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## rac

 *MidnightObsidian wrote:*   

> Can I do that off of the bootable installation ISO?

 

I would think so.  Did it not work when you tried it?

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