Promoting i386 version over x86_64?

[Casey Dahlin]

On 11/18/2009 09:23 PM, King InuYasha wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 8:18 PM, Ikem Krueger
> <ikem.krueger at googlemail.com <mailto:ikem.krueger at googlemail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     > Except, that could be false advertising. In most cases, where CPU
>     > computation is not used heavily, 64-bit is actually SLOWER than
>     the 32-bit
>     > counterpart. Optimizations are narrowing the gap, but it still remains
>     > true.
> 
>     Why then should someone prefer 64bit over 32bit?
> 
> 
> 4 Reasons:
> 
> 1: Date/Time stamp, Unix time doesn't work in 32-bit past 2038 (not
> really affecting us much, most of us will replace our PCs long before then)
> 

I believe even 32-bit kernels now keep the time in a 64-bit integer. This shouldn't apply any more.

> 2: Access more than 4GB of RAM (definitely becoming increasingly important)
> 

The 4GB limit is only on processes. Most recent 32-bit Intels can address 32GB of system memory. Not necessarily relevant, but a win for Linux (Microsoft never figured out how to make this work :).

--CJD