Fw: To amd64 or not to amd64?

[Ken Gunderson]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:28:54 +0400 (MSD)
"alecn2002" <alecn2002 at yandex.ru> wrote:

> 
> 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...
> 
> So,
> 
> 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.

Hi Alec:

You've gotten some good responses already but I'll add mine fwiw.  I've
been using FreeBSD for both server and workstation use for a long, long
time now.  As of late I tend to run amd64 on servers and i386 on
workstations.  Sure you can make things like video codecs, OO, etc.
working w/amd64 on the desktop but you will spend less effort doing so
with i386.  From what you describe it doesn't sound like you're going
to need to worry about 3GB+ of ram or computationally intensive
apps.  If you do decide you want to explore amd64 the suggestion to get
a second identical drive was a good one.

Have fun:)

 -- 

Best regards,

Ken Gunderson

"The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty 
decreases."  (Thomas Jefferson)