Anyone have experience with Acer netbooks ?

[jing]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I really really wish intel would stop being such assholes and stop making
> chips without 64bit support.  These days wtih 2 to 4GB ram becoming
> normal even in laptops, 32bit only cpus are totally stupid.

Completely innocent question out of curiosity; why all the craze for
64-bit processors?  I personally don't understand this request for
64-bit machines for average users.  Yes, I understand there may be
some out there writing monster scientific or DB applications and
what-not that require big memory spaces on monster servers.  But I
just don't see how Firefox, OpenOffice, or MSOffice need 64-bits.  I
don't even understand why people are asking for 64-bit machines on
laptops.

As I understand it, current Intel 32-bit machines are not limited to
only 4GB of RAM by enabling PAE.  Thus, the OS is more than capable of
supporting and servicing more than 4GB of ram.  What a 32-bit machine
cannot do, is it cannot allow a single process to address more than
32-bits of address space.  Thus, the extra ram will have to be
distributed to feeding more than one application.  For example,
Firefox gets 4GB of memory, and OpenOffice gets 4GB of memory, and
there's no swapping on an 8GB machine (oversimplified, but not too far
off, I hope).  Much of what makes a system run smoothly is caching and
buffering, which is managed by the OS anyways so it's not like the app
itself needs to address more than 32-bits of address space.

I think I would be worried about the underlying design of Firefox if
it started asking for more than 32-bits of address space as a
fundamental requirement.  Again, I know there are people out there
running big DBs and scientific genome computations and what-not.  You
know who you are and you know you have big iron requirements, and
there are machines you can buy for that.  I'm curious about average
users that want 64-bits.

So this goes back to my original question.  I hear from many people
(especially consumer users) who push for 64-bit machines.  Why?  You
can still pop more ram into it (AFAIK) and the OS still uses all the
extra ram just fine.  The PAE-enabled 32-bit Linux kernel can service
up to 64GB of RAM (again, AFAIK).  It seems like extra bits mean extra
transistors and extra power burn, especially for laptops.
Furthermore, special-case uses are covered by special registers
already -- for example 64 and 128-bit FPUs and even some 256-bit SIMD
units.  So why the push for 64-bits on everything?
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists