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Just in case it is not clear to everyone, it is perfectly OK to run a
32bit OS on a 64 bit machine. I'm using an Athlon X2 64 bit machine, but
running a 32-bit Fedora on it. The performance difference is
indistinguishable for typical tasks, and it means my binaries are usable
everwhere else.
The downside is that I can't run apps which require more than 3Gb of
memory. But I don't have that much memory anyway.
So in summary, by all means buy 64 bit machines. But unless you have a
very specialised task to perform and are/have a guru to make it work for
you, run it in 32 bit mode. You'll save yourself days of pointless effort.
Ethan Merritt wrote:
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On Friday 26 May 2006 11:45 am, Christina Bourne wrote:
Prior to purchasing a computer with an AMD Turion 64
ML-40 processor, I was wondering if there were any
issues running Linux (SuSe or Ubantu) and packages
common to crystallography (ccp4, cns, o etc.)?
I don't know of any issues with the processor or the
packages per se, but we continue to suffer problems with
64-bit code produced by gfortran. To be specific, the
LAPACK library is in our experience unreliable when
compiled with gfortran for AMD 64-bit.
It may be possible to work around the compiler bugs
with a proper set of compile options, but if so we have
not yet found them :-( Several bugfixes relating to
this are apparently slated for the next release of
gfortran, but I don't know when they will percolate
into the various linux distributions. I also don't
know whether they fix the specific problems we've
been having.
