Difference between i386 and i686 distros

What is the difference between i386 and i686 distros?

Does Red Hat come in a i686 distro?

 

the basic difference is code optimization....i505 distro is optimized for P4 and similar where as i386 is for the obsolete intel 386,......i386 will run on a p4 but i686 will run more efficiently...

i run redhat9 on one of my workstations and it installed the i686 kernel....however i believe that if i install it on a 386....it would automatically use the 386 kernel...

if your distro only installs a 386 kernel you can build a new kernel for the 686 (p4)...

 

I have installed RH 9 on a P4 machine using the only ISO's I could find for RH which were i386.

Does this mean that my installation has been automatically optimised for my i686 machine?

I could only find an i386 distro of RH 9. Is there an i686 RH 9 distro?

Cheers

 

To make it easy for distribution, companies just say that the i386 distros are for Pentium(Intel) class processors.. instead of having separate distros for the i386 and i686.. When you fine tune your kernel during the install, you have the option to set the processor to the type you have..

 

Of course, all predistributed binariaries are all compiled for i386. Unless it is somthing like video, where it will actually take advantage of the 686 class CPU. Distros like Gentoo compile everything from source, which means that every binary is customized for the specific computer.