Well..  I guess a lot can be said about the Pentium, although I will
try to keep it brief.

First, by 'Pentium' I mean the original Pentium and the Pentium MMX.
Not  the Pentium Pro, the Pentium-II or the Pentium-III.  Nor any of
the 586/686 class clones.

The reason for the distinction  is  that  although they all have the
word 'Pentium' in them, the reality is that  there  are  differences
nearly  as  great  between  them as if you were comparing a 486 to a
Classic Pentium!  (Even the original  Pentium  and  the  Pentium/MMX
behave differently, although it's not as great.   For  example,  the
branch prediction is  different,  and  they  have different L1 cache
sizes.)

This difference is important because the 586 version of the  NTT  is
optimized  for  for  the 'regular' Pentium.  On the regular Pentium,
doing integer division and  multiplication are slow.  Therefor, they
have been replaced by rather complicated floating point  code.   And
on  a  regular  Pentium, the improvement is substaintal.  It doubles
the speed over the 486 code.

But  on  a  'Super' Pentium, (or clone, since they'll have different
FPUs) that may not be true.   It's  actually possible for you to get
slightly better performance  with  the  486  code!   (Or  perhaps  a
modified version.)


It's rather ironic, in a way!

I did all the development through v2.2 on a  486/66,  and  now  that
I've  ugpraded to a Pentium/MMX, I'm discovering that those types of
optimizations  may  be  counter  productive  for  the  more advanced
processors that some pi-fan's have!

As I've said in my docs, though...  Whatever processor I  happen  to
have  will  become  the  main  code  version  of the program, simply
because that is what I have.




