Alex White wrote:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 19:40 -0500, Ryan Lum wrote:
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My question is: is the hardware support for
x86_64 as good as i386. I just installed i386 4.1 without a hang or any problems.
Personally, if I was going to run a server, I would use the x86_64 distro ... but if I was going to run a workstation, I would use the i386 distro. To be perfectly honest, if i386 is stable for you and x86_64 is not, I would recommend you use the i386 distro ... in my experience, the difference between the two is not really that noticeable when using the system.
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So then, can anyone point me to documentation or experience that would lead one to choose x86_64 over i386 on a workstation or desktop? Perceived or otherwise performance gains would be nice, I'm just looking for some "why" type stuff if anyone would like to share their experience and or decision making scenarios with me. This can be done off list or on maybe it would benefit some others?
Sincerely,
Alex White
One reason for going 64-bit is larger address space for applications. If you are not doing high-resolution Finite-Element analysis or C.F.D. or astro-physics, the i386 would probably be OK. Of course, there is then the question of 'Why did you buy an Opteron/Athlon64, only to run a 32-bit OS ?' :-) I am also on the SuSE AMD64 list & they are having their share of problems with their current release (9.3). I have been wanting to build a simple Opteron compute server for about a year now, but have been scared off by the apparent lingering stability issues in SuSE 9.2 & 9.3. That's one of the reasons I am here now, trying to see if things are better w/ CentOS :-).