[extropy-chat] TECH: Computer Upgrade Paths...

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 03:30:07PM +1000, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:

> > 64 bit might be a geek toy on a laptop at this stage, however. Does any
> > usable OS take advantage of 64 bit?

Ahem. 

[root at localhost root]# uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.5-1.327 #1 Sun Apr 18 04:53:57 EDT 2004
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I'd say Redhat Fedora Core 2 is fairly usable.

64-bit is a musty old had for *nix. Even Linux had 64 bit versions since
1996, or so.
 
> Yes, Linux has 64 bit support for the Itaniums and Opterons/x86-64 and i
> think G5 too.  Don't know how many optimisations make use of their
> 64-bitness but at minimum you can run 64-bit user space apps and take
> advantage of the extended memory space (48-bit currently in opterons i
> think, don't know about the others)

AMD64 architecture is good price/performance, the 64-bit capability only adds
more registers. Few people have more than 2 GByte core in their desktops
(core/process limit, Windows NT/2k/2003/XP has a 512 MByte threshold above
which it has bad performance due to the way it accesses its memory).

For servers, having a dual-CPU 1U system with up to 16 GByte RAM for a couple
nickles, and a dime (entry is 1.2 kEUR) is very good price/performance
indeed. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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