[mdlug] Time to jump to 64-bit?

Aaron Kulkis akulkis00 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 29 13:51:05 EDT 2009


Ingles, Raymond wrote:
> My main system is Athlon X2 based, quite capable of running 64-bit
> Linux. But I've been sticking with 32-bit versions for now. I only have
> 2GB RAM in there anyway.
> 
>  I understand that the 64-bit instruction set has extra registers and
> such, which can provide a boost of a few percentage points in some
> tasks. But I've heard that there's problems with Flash support, and I
> use Wine and some emulator stuff to run older Windows games. Overall, I
> don't know if the benefits of 64-bit would outweigh the drawbacks in my
> case.

nspluginviewer solves the problem for flash, etc.
The bigger problem is memory bloat. 64-bit code takes
a lot more space both on disk and in memory.

I rolled back my dual-core AMD x86_64 back to 32-bit,
and boot a pae kernel (PAE Physical Address Extension
allows access to over 4 GB of memory for CPUs which
have it).


> 
>  Any opinions or suggestions?
> 

If you don't need 64-bit, don't do it.



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