Fedora 9 32 or 64 Bit - Which One?

Matthew Flaschen matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu
Mon Oct 27 21:08:22 UTC 2008


Alan Cox wrote:

> I'm not aware of anyone having sat down and run formal benchmarks on the
> Fedora desktop. One of the problems with that is that you need a
> reproducable representative benchmark typically scripting all the mouse
> clicks and keypresses, using identical data sets and so on. They are hard
> to produce and I'm not aware of any Linux ones that don't involve payment
> of large sums of money to third party who runs their own closed secret
> test and produces a number you can stick up in lights. So let me turn the
> question around - given that the evidence from microbenchmarks and CPU
> architects is that 64bit is the better choice can you show any
> good quality benchmarks showing it isn't a win ?

I agree getting formal, almost perfectly fair benchmarks is infeasible.
 But I haven't seen any informal benchmarks that come close to showing a
significant performance gain.  I've already pointed to such an informal
benchmark showing negligible difference.

> However if you cared about performance you wouldn't be running Gnome or
> Kde ;)

I don't particularly care about small differences in performance, and I
do like running a highly featured desktop.  But the real question is
whether any performance advantage of desktop 64-bit for < 4 GB is worth
the hassle.  As to that, I'm still very unconvinced.

Matt Flaschen




More information about the fedora-list mailing list