Re: Intel Core2Duo (T7400)
On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 12:05:26AM +0100, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> Any real-world examples?
> Even OpenOffice runs as 64bit since months.
> The only which I remember rumors are "grub". But being a bootloader,
> that probably doesn't hurt much.
> Fact is that I run pure 64bit Linux since months on my home desktop
> (though I'm not the typical desktop user;-).
I know people were working on openoffice, but it has been sufficiently
unstable both 32bit and 64bit that it's hard to ever tell when
openoffice is really working right. :)
How is mplayer with w32codecs doing on 64bit? How about java plugin?
flash v9 plugin?
> Yes, x86_64 has more registers than i386.
That probably doesn't really matter, since all modern i386 systems have
register file renaming and other tricks that avoid going to memory for
many stack operations so not really likely to matter. Exterminating MMX
and x87 on the other hand speeds up context switches and makes floating
point way faster than it is on i386.
> In short: FUD?!
No, theoretically you could have code with so many pointers that the
doubling of size of pointers actually costs enough memory bandwidth to
make a difference. I hope nobody writes code like that. I was just
trying to be thorough on any disadvantages too. Probably irrelevant on
an AMD, but might hurt on a multi cpu intel since they still have much
more limited memory bandwidth available.
> Some browsers (konqueror, firefox as far as I've been told) allow to run
> 32bit plugins from the 64bit version. Since the flash-plugin and others
> is not really important for me, I don't really care.
Well they are important to a lot of people. The new ability to run
32bit plugins certainly helps too.
> Or install 32bit libs and run a 32bit browser/application on the x86_64
> installation.
Except that is a bit of a pain and doesn't fit dpkg/apt very well.
> Yes, but that implies "Vista" there and God knows how compatible (even
> to pre-Vista Windoze) the result will be.
Well there was 64bit xp although few used it (often due to lack of
drivers for their hardware. Hooray for closed source drivers!), and
certainly a number of programs do not officially support 64bit vista yet
even though they support 32bit vista and 32 and 64bit XP. I guess in a
year or two when people start wanting to use 4 or 8GB ram on their
desktops they won't have a choice anymore and things might start working
in 64bit windows world.
--
Len Sorensen
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