Re: Processors older than Intel Pentium 4
>> On 64 bit machines it would have the same memory usage as i386 and
>> arm32 but with the extra registers and features that the newer
>> processors support.
>> Something like that.
> Thanks for the answer. But is there really a need for this?
> 64 Bit CPUs exist for more than 15 years and no such ports are common
> yet. The amount of RAM also increased rapidly. I don't think that such
> a port will be used widely.
AFAIK the x32 port for amd64 (i.e. aiming to combine the frugality of
i386 with the performance advantage of amd64's extra registers) is an
old effort that never took off (I think it started too late and by the
time it worked well, people didn't care any more).
Don't know if that will have any more success in the arm64 world.
I'm not holding my breath.
Stefan
PS: FWIW, that same approach was quite popular in the world of Irix on
SGI machines, at the end of last century where most machines still had
significantly less than 4G of RAM.
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