32- versus 64-bit fedora on an AMD 64 mobile athlon?

[John Summerfield]

Phil Meyer wrote:
> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>   moving on, i have a roomful of gateway MX7120 laptops (with AMD
>> 64-bit mobile athlon CPU) that i use for linux training and, until
>> now, i've just wimped out and installed the 32-bit version of fedora
>> on them for my clients, and that works just fine.
>>
>>   but i figure, why waste all that 64-bit computing power, so is there
>> any compelling reason to *not* upgrade them all to fedora x86_64 for
>> those courses?  that is, are there any real show-stoppers when it
>> comes to fedora x86_64 that would make that version unusable?
>> thanks.
>>   
> ...
> 
> If you are having students compile stuff, then you need to stick to the 
> lowest common denominator (32bit) or else they cannot use those compiled 
> programs elsewhere.
> 
> Also, plugins are not the only issue.  Sun's Java is only 32bit for x86 
> arches.
> 
> Other apps, like Lotus, which are Java dependent will have issues.
> 
> Other commercial apps are likely to be 32bit only.
> 
> Until MS and intel force the world to go 64bit, ISVs simply aren't 
> interested.
> 
> The same is true for multi-processing, which has been around for decades 
> and is ignored by ISVs because MS tools ignore it.  And there is no 
> other SDKs besides those that MS provides, is there?

I have been wondering how well Windows and Linux will exploit the 
advantages of the Quads now coming out.

OS/2, were it still around in numbers, should cope pretty well, one of 
the programming standards was that if a task might take more than a 
certain about of time (and I think that that was .1 second, it was very 
short to a human) then it should start a new thread.

Think of printing, do you really want to sit around while Firefox prints 
something? I don't.

I use KDE, and there's an enormous amount of stuff that could be run in 
parallel and is not, and I really do not like all those progress boxes 
that pop up for a second's work.




-- 

Cheers
John

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