Is it worth using an i686 optimised distro?

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Exactly what it says on the tin.

The reason I ask is because I'm trying to keep the distro I'm using the same for both my desktop and laptop.

Gentoo and Arch seem to be the main runners in i686 optimisation at the moment but does it really make that much of a difference?
My desktop is an AMD64 so I can put pretty much whatever I like onto that. My laptop is a centrino duo (which I assume is i686.). Will i686 make any difference compared to using an i386 distro?

Regards,
Freakish_05
 
I found you can get a couple of extra % out of it but if you are using a system that compiles from source, yes I'm looking at you Gentoo, the time to compile sort of outways any speed advantages. If you've got a 64 binary distro go for it otherwise it depends if you want to waste time getting a few % out of a recompile
 
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