64-bit CPU

[Christopher Browne]

> My wife's laptop has an athlon 64 which so far has 32bit debian i386,
> 32bit windows xp and 64bit windows xp on it.  So far no problems with
> any of them, other than a lack of broadcom wireless drivers for 64bit
> xp.  We haven't tried the 64bit debian on it yet, although sometime
> soon we will.  Debian has about 97% of the packages built native 64bit
> for it,

I see little point to jumping to 64 bit mode on the AMD64 laptops.

- They don't support more than about 1GB of RAM, which means you're not
  getting any improvement over 32 bit mode

- Widening addresses to 64 bits and likely widening some instructions,
  is likely to decrease performance somewhat.

This doesn't point to there being any lowlying fruit to the jump to 64
bits...
--
output = ("cbbrowne" "@" "acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/languages.html 
All ITS machines now have hardware for a new machine instruction -- PFLT
Prove Fermat's Last Theorem.  Please update your programs.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml