Jim McCloskey wrote: > I recently acquired a new Dell Studio 15 laptop and mean to install > Debian (squeeze) on it. I'm trying to decide whether to do a 64-bit > install (amd64) or a 32-bit install (i386). My understanding is that > the amd64 port is now very complete, and that the principal difficulty > would probably be with flashplayer (since Adobe withdrew the 64-bit > version of flashplayer 10 for linux). That pretty much agrees with my view of things. I have been running a 64-bit desktop for many years. I mostly use a 32-bit chroot for things that I want to keep "mainstream" like Firefox. > There seem to be various workarounds for this issue, but I was > wondering if the performance gain that one might expect from the > 64-bit architecture over the 32-bit architecture would be worth the > extra trouble entailed by these workarounds. The performance difference is very small. Some natively compiled applications will perform better in 64-bit mode due to the larger number of cpu registers available for the optimizer. You would need to benchmark any particular application for real data. Some applications will have a noticeable performance difference. But I personally don't see a large performance difference either way as an overall statement about the system in general. For practical purposes I would say performace between them is basically the same. It really comes down to memory use. If you need the memory in one process then you need the 64-bit system to be able to use more than 3G of ram in a single process. > The machine has a 1.6GHz Intel Quad Core processor and 6GB of > RAM. The GPU is an ATI Mobility Radeon (HD 5470) with 1GB of onboard > memory. You have 6G of memory and so with a 64-bit system you would be able to run a single program that could access all 6G of that memory. With a 32-bit system a single process is limited to 3G of memory. The 32-bit Linux kernel with PAE will be able to make good use of all 6G across the entire system. So either way the system will be able to use all of the memory. > The laptop will be a work machine, but it will not be required to do > 3D modelling or any intensive mathematical tasks (except maybe some > statistical analysis and visualization with R, along with some audio > analysis). By this I assume you won't need that 6G of ram in any one program because I would describe that as intensive. :-) Also you don't sound like you want to develop and debug and so want a 64-bit environment specifically for that purpose. In which case I personally would go with the 32-bit Linux kernel with PAE. It is still the mainstream architecture and so somewhat simpler. Bob
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