Fw: To amd64 or not to amd64?

[O. Hartmann]

Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> "alecn2002" writes:
>> The question is: will I have any benefits if I'll move to amd64 system, or it
>> 's safer and better to stay with i386 arch?
>>
> [snip]
>> Problem-free operation and stability have precedense for me over system speed
>>
> 
> The only real advantage of 64-bit over 32-bit is that you can put more than
> 4 GB of RAM into the box. If you don't plan to do that, then stick with
> i386. I've been using a dual-core AMD64 for a while now and I've decided to
> stick with i386.

Well, in many cases you'll prefere the amd64 architecture in case of the 
need of more than 3 or 3.5 GB RAM. Due to architectural and BIOS 
limitations memory remapping on 32Bit systems doesn't work properly or 
is sometimes slow (my experiences).

On the other hand, for scientific usage the 64Bit architecture delievers 
benefits to me, but at home usage it sometimes like a pitfall. Several 
codecs still aren't portet to 64Bit and my impression is that some kind 
of software based on JAVA is really flaky and/or slow. OpenOffice still 
has no pure/clean 64Bit port as I know so far.
Linuxulator in FreeBSD is still not capable running 64Bit Linux-native 
applications, but you can run FreeBSD/Linuxulator in a 32Bit comapt mode 
also.
Memory consumption on AMD64/64Bit CPU is  20% - 30% more than on 
i386/32Bit - in some cases.

> 
> [snip]
>> And one side question: will I benefit if I move to amd64 system and install g
>> cc-4.1, over current gcc-3.4.4 that came with system?
>> And the same - if I'll stay in i386 mode but upgrade to gcc-4.1?
>> I mean here both compilation speed and efficiency of generated code.
>>
> 
> I can't answer this, but I don't think that all ports and sources are
> gcc-4.1 clean yet.