Anyone have experience with Acer netbooks ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:06:30PM -0400, waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 03:33:37PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote
> 
> > x86-64 is a better instruction set, and runs faster except in a
> > few odd cases.  This is very different from pretty much every other
> > architecture that has ever gone from 32 to 64bit.  Most slow down.
> 
>   This, and a lot of your other points are valid for heavy-duty tasks.
> But I'm talking about buying a *NETBOOK* fer-cryin-out-loud.  Many of
> your arguments are equivalant to urging potential buyers of subcompacts
> to buy a Hummer instead.  If I was doing stuff that needed that much
> ram and cpu power, I wouldn't be looking at a netbook in the first
> place.

If 64bit instructions do the task 10% faster, than that's 10% faster
performance on your netbook, and less time before it can go back to
power saving mode.  Sounds like a feature you might want.

> > x86-64 mandates the use of SSE for floating point, while x86 uses x87.
> > This makes floating point much much faster, and avoids the awfullness
> > that is the x87 stack based FPU.  This means all 64bit software can
> > safely use SSE because it is a part of the instruction set.  x86 code
> > can not assume that if it wants to just work.
> 
>   Long live Gentoo.  From my /etc/make.conf (yes, I'm running 32 bits)
> CFLAGS="-O2 -march=prescott -mmmx -msse -msse2 -msse3 -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

And now your code is no longer 32bit x86 compatible.  Only some CPUs
will run it.  With 64bit x86 that is safe to do all the time since all
CPUs have it.

And good grief I hope gentoo and java could just go away one of these
days for serving no real purpose other than to waste time and resources.

>   Since the Open Source world does have open source, this allows distros
> like Gentoo to compile apps from tarballs to a variety of architectures.
> There are currently handbooks for installing Gentoo on x86, sparc, amd64,
> ppc, ppc64, alpha, hppa, mips, ia64, and arm.  Given that sparc, ppc,
> alpha, hppa, and mips are still being supported now, I'm sure that x86
> support will continue for a long while.  If I was buying a machine for
> running Windows, your argument might be more valid.

Sure it will, but until the majority of software in use is opensource
and compiles and works on all those architectures people will still have
to deal with it.

For me running a pure 64bit system has been rather easy and painless.
For my dad running windows, 64bit has had some issues with software
compatibility (so far 2 of his programs simply can't run on 64bit and
have to be run on his old machine instead).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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