>    I thought the 16-byte alignment would also benefit secondary caches
>    that use such (or larger) cache line sizes?
> 
> So the theory goes.  In practice it has no significant effect, and even
> worse, the larger code could cause the cache (especially the internal
> one on the 486) to roll over more quickly.

The XFree86 folks were seeing a 10-15% speedup from using -m486 on 486's
and little to no (1-2%) difference when running on 386's with the 1.3
server.  I haven't heard anything about the recent 2.0 server, but it's
still compiled with those flags by default on machines using gcc as
their compiler.


Nate

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