Confused

[John Chronakis <linux@vmpsoft.com>]

Hello,

After reading the howto and browsing the mailing list I am still 
confused about the debian version(s) of amd64.

So I here is my situation.
In the company I working we are developing a project involving physics, 
3d, opengl, gtk and more. We are currently using debian sarge on i386 
but we decided to switch to pure 64 bit amd64 hardware. We want a pure 
64 bit environment and we do not care about openoffice / flash or any 
commercial software. We already ordered 3 amd64 boxes and they arriving 
tomorrow, so it's time to decide what distro/version to install.

And here are my questions:
* How does debian amd64 compares with other distros (suse, fedora) in 
terms of stability and 64 bit efficiency?
* What is the difference between pure64 and gcc-3.4? I saw somewhere 
that gcc-3.4 binaries run faster. Is there a catch?
* The mailing list left me with the impression that sarge is not ready 
yet, is it?. Does it keep up with the i386 sarge? Can it be installed 
like an i386 sarge (net inst->base system->package installation)?

I personally like the idea of the gcc-3.4, since it looks like the 
"most" 64 bit version. However this is not intended for my home pc and I 
would not like to make difficult the life of my colleagues who are not 
experienced Linux users.

Any help would be appreciated.


Regards

John