To amd64 or not to amd64?

[Gibson, Jasen (GE Indust, ConsInd, consultant)]

-----Original Message-----
>Well, probably this question was discussed here many times, but the last thread about "transiting from i386 to
>amd64" dated year 2004, so it's very posible things change since that time...
>
>I've just upgraded my home comp from AMD Sempron to Athlon64. Only CPU upgrade, nothing else.
>
>I've booted my old good i386-arched FreeBSD 6.1 and it looks like it works fine.
>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?
>
>About 50% of time my children use it to watch movies (DVD, DivX, MPEG-4).
>From the rest I use it for working at home (RadRails, KDevelop, a lot of C/C++ compilation), and my wife use it to >access Internet and use OpenOffice.
>
>Problem-free operation and stability have precedense for me over system speed.
>Even more detail: AFAIK there is no amd64 NVidia driver for direct rendering available, is it correct?
>
>And one side question: will I benefit if I move to amd64 system and install gcc-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 all of your specific questions, as I do not use FreeBSD as a desktop system, but I can tell you that the current release of the amd64 port is just as stable as the i386 for me.
I switched from an AthlonMP system to an Opteron platform for a production server.  I ran both the 32-bit and 64-bit ports on the new system during the testing phase, and they pretty much seemed identical in terms of stability.  I didn't benchmark to see if there was much performance difference, but I doubt that there was.  I'm using the server for Apache and Mysql.
The other main benefit besides the 4GB limit is that the 64-bit extensions give you more register space, which could significantly speed up computational-heavy applications.  Things like webbrowsers or OpenOffice, not so much.  I'd imagine a compiler would fit that category though.

There is no amd64 nVidia driver yet, which is annoying.  They released one for Linux, just not FreeBSD yet.  If that's important, then i386 may be the best bet for you.