Scott Tiret wrote: > On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 20:07 -0400, Sean wrote: > >>I have a dual opteron here and I am thinking of putting Gentoo on it. I >>am trying to decide to go with either the amd64 or i386 version. >>So I am asking some Gentoo amd64 users, are you happy with the version >>or would you have gained more with i386? >>Do most applications work on amd64 or are there some important ones missing? > > > I have been running an x86_64 (amd64) system for a few months now. The > only thing I have been missing is a 64bit version of Macromedia > Shockwave plugin. Apparently, there is no 64bit version for this > proprietary software. > > Everything else is fine. I have all I need on my desktop. x86_64 > version of Openoffice-bin (rc3) takes a long time to open, but is > promising. > > Good luck, > I thought the email might be a good place to ask for some ideas:
I don't want to start a 64bit vs 32 bit war, or a Windows versus *nix war, but it has been my experience so far that the fastest benchmarks for a highly computation intensive program written in Numeric Python came on my 3.5Ghz P4 laptop with hyperthreading- on Windows. Also, running the same program on an AMD Opteron gave me a slower speed no matter what OS I was using. I performed the experiments when the Opteron was first introduced. I paid a high price for the fastest chip I could find- I don't remember the exact speed. I haven't tried the test lately though. Maybe it has gotten much better. Do not ask me why it happened, I have no idea. But even now, Windows+P4 has consistently been 3x faster in execution time than any Python on 32 bit *nix systems. The specific program is a Numeric Python port of the NEC2 EM Simulator program which calculates the Norton-Summerfield ground coefficients under an antenna. It makes much use of Complex-64 variables. I ported it from FORTRAN so I could more easily see how the program worked. I am baffled by the behavior. The only thing I can figure might be occuring would be that the *nix 64 bit toolchains are much younger than the 32 bit ones. But as the 32 bit Numeric Python on Windows is still 3x faster than the *nix equivalents, I have asked Activestate, the Windows Python provider, if they do anything special when compiling the code and they say no. I think they said that they use some ordinary MS comiler. Any ideas would help me to put to rest the problem. I say it is a problem as I really don't want to boot into Windows XP to run scientific programs in Numeric Python. Thanks, Rob. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
