Hi,
I've Intel® Pentium® D processor 820 in my desktop. Which version should I install, i386 or x86_64 ? I understand that i386 works but how is x86_64 ? If I understand correctly, this processor is also EM64T. Which are cons and pros ?
Best regards, Kari
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Kari Salovaara wrote:
I've Intel® Pentium® D processor 820 in my desktop. Which version should I install, i386 or x86_64 ? I understand that i386 works but how is x86_64 ? If I understand correctly, this processor is also EM64T. Which are cons and pros ?
if your processor is EM64T then install the x86_64 version. there are no cons. You will experience performance increases.
You performance increases will vary depending on what you are doing.
If you are just a desktop user then you may not really be able to quantify any gains, but if you are running a very busy server doing alot of IO then you will benefit greatly.
On 2/24/06, Robin Mordasiewicz robin@mordasiewicz.com wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Kari Salovaara wrote:
I've Intel(r) Pentium(r) D processor 820 in my desktop. Which version should I install, i386 or x86_64 ? I understand that i386 works but how is x86_64 ? If I understand correctly, this processor is also EM64T. Which are cons and pros ?
if your processor is EM64T then install the x86_64 version. there are no cons. You will experience performance increases.
There are always cons... There are some user-end things which don't play well in a true 64bit environment. Flash is a good example. I'm not sure if this has been resolved or not, but flash didn't support x86_64, and so would not render on pages. The fix was to install the x86 browser, libs and flash versions. I'm not rich enough to have x86_64 yet, so I don't know if this still applies.
-- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety'' Benjamin Franklin 1775
On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 10:34 -0500, Jim Perrin wrote:
On 2/24/06, Robin Mordasiewicz robin@mordasiewicz.com wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Kari Salovaara wrote:
I've Intel(r) Pentium(r) D processor 820 in my desktop. Which version should I install, i386 or x86_64 ? I understand that i386 works but how is x86_64 ? If I understand correctly, this processor is also EM64T. Which are cons and pros ?
if your processor is EM64T then install the x86_64 version. there are no cons. You will experience performance increases.
There are always cons... There are some user-end things which don't play well in a true 64bit environment. Flash is a good example. I'm not sure if this has been resolved or not, but flash didn't support x86_64, and so would not render on pages. The fix was to install the x86 browser, libs and flash versions. I'm not rich enough to have x86_64 yet, so I don't know if this still applies.
And of course, the way you solve this is to have both the i386 and x86_64 versions installed.
This is a huge con, as it becomes much harder to maintain updates. You need to modify you rpmmacros to see both the i386 and x86_64 packages.
If you are going to try to compile anything on a multi-lib arch machine, you will need to create separate chroots (or VMs with xen / vmware. etc.) so that you can compile programs that work on either another x86_64 or i386 machine ... as 64 bit and 32bit stuff will be compiled otherwise.
You will also have problems getting some i386 software installed over the x86_64 software as there are shared doc files and shared man files the sometimes conflict with each other.
Personally ... unless I know for a fact that I will not need any i386 software, I install i386 and not x86_64 distro. If I wanted a workstation, I would not install x86_64. That is just my opinion.
Johnny Hughes wrote:
Personally ... unless I know for a fact that I will not need any i386 software, I install i386 and not x86_64 distro. If I wanted a workstation, I would not install x86_64. That is just my opinion.
Me too. 8-) Unless I'm actually bitten by a limitation that is *solved* by going to 64 bits, I don't see any real temptation to deal with the potential pitfalls at this juncture. Things like flash and java are only the most high profile issues, but I'm told there are a number of other niggly issues if you're running a desktop or if you're running off-the-shelf software which assumes x86.
Cheers,
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Chris Mauritz wrote:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
Personally ... unless I know for a fact that I will not need any i386 software, I install i386 and not x86_64 distro. If I wanted a workstation, I would not install x86_64. That is just my opinion.
Me too. 8-)
Da! The i386 release is blistering fast and very well behaved on the Opterons in our shop.
Paul Heinlein wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Chris Mauritz wrote:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
Personally ... unless I know for a fact that I will not need any i386 software, I install i386 and not x86_64 distro. If I wanted a workstation, I would not install x86_64. That is just my opinion.
Me too. 8-)
Da! The i386 release is blistering fast and very well behaved on the Opterons in our shop.
Yup, it's very happy on my dual Opteron 270 boxes too. Is there any reliable information on potential speedup by going to 64-bit? For typical server duty, I can't see how, but I'm sure that's not the case on boxes with big honkin' databases or ones doing serious number crunching.
Cheers,
Yup, it's very happy on my dual Opteron 270 boxes too. Is there any reliable information on potential speedup by going to 64-bit? For typical server duty, I can't see how, but I'm sure that's not the case on boxes with big honkin' databases or ones doing serious number crunching.
From what I've read the big bonus is in the handling of much larger
amounts of memory, disk space etc. As far as actual 'speed' improvements I've not seen any data about this.
-- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety'' Benjamin Franklin 1775
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Chris Mauritz wrote:
Paul Heinlein wrote:
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Chris Mauritz wrote:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
Personally ... unless I know for a fact that I will not need any i386 software, I install i386 and not x86_64 distro. If I wanted a workstation, I would not install x86_64. That is just my opinion.
Me too. 8-)
Da! The i386 release is blistering fast and very well behaved on the Opterons in our shop.
Yup, it's very happy on my dual Opteron 270 boxes too. Is there any reliable information on potential speedup by going to 64-bit? For typical server duty, I can't see how, but I'm sure that's not the case on boxes with big honkin' databases or ones doing serious number crunching.
<disclaimer> No scientific data follows </disclaimer>
In our shop we are rending animation. We have dual opterons. We render with the 64 bit version of mental ray. We did side by side tests and found that the larger and more complex the task is the more savings there were, but when rendering a bunch of small simple files the savings were not noticeable.
On the very complex shots we cut render times by almost half. Most of our jobs are not very complex so the ratio evens out at about roughly a 10-20 percent gain. But the thing is that when the time comes to do something very complex comes it can be finished in say three days as opposed to five days.
Robin Mordasiewicz wrote:
<disclaimer> No scientific data follows </disclaimer>
In our shop we are rending animation. We have dual opterons. We render with the 64 bit version of mental ray. We did side by side tests and found that the larger and more complex the task is the more savings there were, but when rendering a bunch of small simple files the savings were not noticeable.
On the very complex shots we cut render times by almost half. Most of our jobs are not very complex so the ratio evens out at about roughly a 10-20 percent gain. But the thing is that when the time comes to do something very complex comes it can be finished in say three days as opposed to five days.
Wow, that's useful information for me since some of these machines are ultimately going to be put to use doing video media encoding of D1 and HD video. I guess I'll have to run some tests too and see if we notice similar speedups for media encoding.
Cheers,
On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 11:44, Chris Mauritz wrote:
On the very complex shots we cut render times by almost half. Most of our jobs are not very complex so the ratio evens out at about roughly a 10-20 percent gain. But the thing is that when the time comes to do something very complex comes it can be finished in say three days as opposed to five days.
Wow, that's useful information for me since some of these machines are ultimately going to be put to use doing video media encoding of D1 and HD video. I guess I'll have to run some tests too and see if we notice similar speedups for media encoding.
Does anyone have experience or benchmarks with the amd64 version of Sun Java vs. 32 bit (or 32-bit on an x86 vs. x86_64 Linux)?
Dear friends,
I want to thank You (and some off-lists) of Your valuable points related this 32/64 question. I've made my decision, this workstation is on my desktop so I install both ! I've a server (under the table) so that's online. I'm going to install 32 for my real work and 64 for testing (and maybe for large graphics etc.) and wait a little while to see what's going to happen.
Thanks and have a nice weekend, Kari
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Chris Mauritz -
Jim Perrin -
Johnny Hughes -
Kari Salovaara -
Les Mikesell -
Paul Heinlein -
Robin Mordasiewicz