AMD Athlon64 Systems

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Chris Ricker wrote:

>> Does a 64bit mozilla even make sense right now?
>> I'd think just using the 32bit version would be fine. And no issues with 
>> plugins.
>
>yep -- for most apps, going 64-bit is pointless

Depends on the specific CPU architecture.  For AMD64, 64bit means 
that you also get a slew of additional registers for gcc to use 
for optimization for free.  In my experience 64bit applications 
have a definite benefit over 32bit on AMD64, the exception being 
apps that are highly disk or network bound (I/O bound), which 
don't benefit much.


>> What is the 32/64 bit split in Sparc linux distros? PowerPC distros?
>
>Aurora is 64-bit kernel, 32-bit userspace on UltraSparc

AMD64 architecture provides more benefits to general 64bit apps 
than broken 64bit sparc processors do.  ;o)


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat