Optimizing for processor

["Aaron W." <kaw at camalott dot com>]

   I have been lurking on this list for a couple weeks to see if I could
pick up any info on how to compile a program with specific processor
options and other ways to make programs run faster. I must say that I am
not a programer and this list is way above my head for the most part. I
have looked around on the egcs homepage and downloaded a list of i386
options but they don't really help me much because I don't know how to use
they correctly. I have a few ?s and I hope that yall (yes I am from Texas)
don't mind a newbie picking your brains a little :).
  If I download a tar file uncompress it run make and make config are there
options I can put after make to help optimize the code for my processor
(pentium 200MMX)? Or does this need to be done in a make file? If so where
in the file?
  Is "make" a frontend to egcs or gcc?
  How do I know if I should use gcc or egcs? and how do I tell it the one I
want to use?
Thanks for your time,

Aaron Winters, Electronic Imaging Manager.
Garner Printing, http://camalott.com/~garner