What's i586 and PPC?

[Robenco18]

wat are those things??? wat's it mean? remember i am a total newbie so if it involves big words explain it to me

[scientica]

Different CPUs, the i586 is the inte pentium processor, and PPC is PowerPC (I'm not sure but I think it's an mac cpu).
Often used to tell for instance gcc (a C/C++ compiler) what CPU to build the exes for.

[Hellmasker]

pretty much. ppc is generally a macintosh cpu (unless u somehow made ur own system with a mac cpu or sometign insane)

x86 refers to all intel compatible cpus (commonly called pc's although this term technically refers to all "Personal Computers")

the 3/4/5/6 in front of the 86 is somethign to do with the cpu architecture (i cant remeber what right now). and i guess the i is for intel compat) This naming schemee was taken from the old intel cpu's which were called 386 and later 486, when amd copied the 486 name, since it was commonly recognised, intel triewd to copyrite the 3 numbers , and were shot down, so where they would have released the 586 they changed the name to pentium (penta = greek/roman 5, think pentogram=5 sides).

somewhere along the line cyrix brought out a 686 chip (a long time ago since i have 1 sitting in a 1997 computer) and others decided a few years after to move to this architectue. (the athlon/duron and p4 i think were the first from intel/amd)

enuf of the history lesson tho, code compiled for low numbers eg. i386 will run on higher number machines, although high numebr apps wont run on low number comps. this is because of code optimisations designed for high number cpus that icrease the performace of the app.

that is also 1 fo the main reasons for compiling ur own kernel. u get to select ur specific cpu (eg. p4, p3, athlon, etc) and have akernel that is designed to run faster thatn the factory 1.

[Jman]

Both of those are processor types.

ppc is PowerPC.
i386 is the origional Intel 80386.
i586 is Pentium Pro and later (I believe)
i686 is Celeron and later.
I don't know about Pentium 4.

Just for fun, try

uname -m

in a terminal prompt to determine what you are running.

Frequently these are used to distinguish what type of processor software is compiled for.