Re: amd64 into mainstream
On Sunday 17 April 2005 5:01pm, Thomas Steffen wrote:
> However, for the end user that should not make a big difference. You
> will have more mirrors,
For some users that *is* a big difference. :)
Alioth doesn't perform as well as us.debian.org for me for some reason,
frequent pauses during downloads, perhaps because its already doing so much.
IIRC, alioth was never really meant to host a full distribution, but other
related projects of Debian.
And don't forget about the rest of the Debian infrastructure, like having
non-us support us too, or being able to grab AMD64 packages off of
www.debian.org's web interface, along with third parties that don't support
us now because we're still an unclaimed orphan.
If we were expensive niche hardware, I'd understand Debian's inertia, but as
soon as we become a first-class citizen supported by d-i and Debian's
infrastructure, I fully expect AMD64 to fairly quickly become the second most
popular Debian distro precisely because we *aren't* expensive niche hardware.
There are a *lot* of Athlon64s out there already, compatible with and
competitively priced against existing 32bit X86 chips, and more are coming -
AMD will ramp up production even more as it switches to its new 90nm fab
process used for its latest Sempron, A64, and Opteron chips (all AMD64 - and
the old saw about AMD not having fab capacity is now just a myth) - never
mind Intel's EM64T AMD64-compatible chips now coming out - X86_64 systems
will eventually outnumber actively used PPC systems in 2 - 3 years or so (or
less?).
Quite a few of those AMD64 systems are already running Debian i386 right now,
but most of those people won't consider X86_64 until we become a full
official member of the Debian family. And when Windows64 finally gets out,
AMD64 (including Intel's equivalent) will become the preferred X86 system
(unless MS shoots itself in the foot by pricing W64 out of range of most
desktop users). But alas, despite the writing on the wall, we still have to
wait for Debian to get its act together, all the while losing more people to
(K)Ubuntu - I have to admit to having been seriously tempted to switch myself
lately - if our AMD64 support is "complete", then Ubuntu's AMD64 platform is
"polished".
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