On 11/01/2014 06:48 AM, Gordon Messmer wrote:
On 10/31/2014 08:53 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
Nobody is_buying_ 32 bit machines any more, but machines sold 10 years ago were surprisingly robust
They were also surprisingly slow. Without any hyperbole, you could almost certainly replace an entire rack of ten year old 1U servers with a single 1U server today for a very reasonable cost and see performance that's at least equal, with a fraction of the power draw (and associated ongoing costs).
There is an assumption here that someone would only want to use CentOS on the server. I have at least two old laptops in my house that I would love to put CentOS 7 on, giving them decent software and then not having to worry about upgrading the distro for ten years which gives the OS a lifespan comparable to a windows version, I can't though, because they're 32 bit. This is also a good way to re-purpose an old laptop or desktop for the underprivileged to use.
Another thing to consider is that there are still people who want to put a 32 bit OS on a 64 bit VM instance, mainly because VMs tend to have a lot less RAM than you'd see on bare-metal hardware, and the savings in RAM usage of a 32 bit app vs 64 bit one can be significant. These would still be running on 64 bit hardware but using a 32 bit OS *on purpose*.
Peter