On 3/29/06, Lord Sauron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > www.alienware.com I beg to differ. I could have sworn I saw a laptop > with more than 2G... where was it... wow! You appear to be right! > Darn.. I could have SWORN I saw something with > 2G...
Actually, you are right. I neglected the monstrous Clevo laptop. Its an AMD X2 with capacity for 2 optical drives plus 2 hard drives, up to 3G of memory, and a 200W power adapter. Weighs 12-15 lbs, _not_ counting the power adapter! This is acutally a Clevo design, sold by Sager, AGearnotebooks, and many others. Alienware got it with a customized case. All of the reviews I read on it basically said "incredible performance, excellent display, but heavy, noisy, and really hard to describe how large it really is". I was actually considering purchasing this beast...but the noise factor scared me off. Not really appropriate for a shared office or conference room. > compiler helps with the 64-bit part. It gets a bit technical, but > there is a big difference between something made from the ground up as > 64-bit versus something that was made 32-bit and just recompiled > 64-bit. For most applications, this is not true. The vast majority of C/C++ code that runs on a desktop system couldn't care less whether longs and pointers are 32-bits or 64-bits in size. It is a compiler function to deal with that. And it is also a compiler function to determine whether 64-bit or 32-bit registers should be used for a particular operation. FYI, gcc has supported non-x86 64-bit CPUs for a long time, so gcc's 64-bit support is probably more mature than you think. So are the applications...many open source applications were ported and adapted (if necessary) to 64-bit sparc and alpha processors back in the late 90s. There are opportunities for some programs to take advantage of special processor operations through assembly instructions. This is very similar to how 3Dnow, MMX, SSE, et. al. make programs faster. So there may be some specific optimizations for some operations that can be improved over time. An example of an application domain that could benefit from 64-bit is encryption, because for key setups you need to calculate very large numbers. Such numbers could be calculated about twice as fast with 64-bit operations vs 32-bit. *BUT*, this does almost nothing for the actual data encryption itself. A good resource on the 64-bit vs 32-bit issues is to look at AMDs optimization guide for software developers. Chapter 3 is particularly relevant: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/25112.PDF -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
