Welcome to My Computers Section

    My Computers as in mine and others. I have four of them linked together in my home. Two are for me, one for my wife and another one for my son. In this mess we use SuSE Linux, WinXP, Win2k and Win98. All of these systems can talk to one another .. most of the time.

    The others part is just a general discussion on computers and the peripherals that can be connected to them. In case you haven't already discovered them, there are two excellent resources of computer information listed above in the top menu. I find good explanations in both. (The middle one is for plain English)

    Linux OS's or User Mode

Some Info

    I swiped/borrowed this from LinuxForums.  It's good info that I want to share and I don't want to loose. So I copied it here.

Originally Posted by techieMoe
To give a little more information on that, the X86 processors started with the Intel 8086 processor way back in 1978. They were incrementally improved (80186, 80286) and then Intel released the Intel 386 (i386) in 1980. That was then followed by he 486 (i486), the Pentium (i586), and the Pentium 3/4 (i686) and AMD's Athlon/Duron/T-bird (also i686).

Since all these processors were based on the same architecture (basically they read/wrote 1's and 0's in the same way), and their names all contained "86", the whole family was collectively called "X86". All the X86 processors were 32-bit.

But, alas I must correct an oversite. When refering to the size of a processor by 16, 32 or 64 bit we are really talking about its memory interface. How much memory can be addressed is determined by the address register size. In the case of the 8086, 80186, 80286, and 80386SX, they all have a (16-bit) Memory Interface. The 80386DX started the 32-bit Memory Interfacing for Intel.

The recent trend has been to move toward 64-bit processors, and several different architectures popped up. DEC's Alpha and Motorola's PPC chips have been 64-bit for a while, but Intel's Itanium and Xeon and AMD's Athlon64 are the new kids on the block.

The difference between the Itanium and PPC versus the Athlon64 is that the Itanium and PPC have completely different architectures (they speak different 1 and 0 languages), whereas the Athlon64 speaks the same language as the 32-bit X86 processors, but adds 64-bit registers. Therefore the name of the Athlon64 in generic terms is "X86_64".

Intel, not to be outdone, has since redesigned its 64-bit Xeon processors to use the same kind of architecture as the Athlon64, calling it "Intel 64-bit with Extended Memory Technoloty". Basically they couldn't say they copied AMD without being laughed at in irony (since AMD got its start by simply copying Intel's chips).

And I'm sure that's much more information than you care to know.. but now you do. Amaze your friends.

And a comment from Begmak:
Then there's the choice between i386, x86_64, and ppc. Here's how to figure out which one you need:

• i386 - If you have a Pentium or Celeron (meaning any Pentium or Celeron, including a Pentium 4, Pentium M, etc.) or the original Core Duo - a Pentium D,
  (not a Core 2 Duo). This includes i486, i586 and i686.
• x86_64 - If you have a Core 2 Duo, Core Solo, Opteron, Athlon 64, Turion 64, or Sempron. (This also includes the new "Intel Mac" machines.)
• ppc - Any modern Mac that's not an Intel Mac.

Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map

To the Pages:
   Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map
   Dual-channel architecture

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