Talk:Intel Core 2 Duo

The Intel Core processors seem to be a bit of a hybrid, according to various sources including Intel. In particular, though they support the Pentium 4 instructions (including SSE3), according to Intel they are apparently based on the Pentium M (not Pentium-4 M) architecture.

That seems to mean that while the compiler options should be "-march prescott", it may be more sensible to tell the kernel it's processor family=Pentium M. (I know this appears to conflict with the gcc man page, which says that -march=prescott is an enhanced Pentium 4, but it's talking about "real" Prescott chips, and the Core series have a different lineage.)

My thinking is that the kernel uses the processor family to control things like power modes, and that's architecture-based, rather than code optimization, which is instruction-set-based.