OTOH & IMHO, It's nearly always disk and filesystem speed which is the bottle-neck for day to day computing, thus - unless you are runnimg heavy-duty number-crunching processes, such as rendering picture frames - in practice there is very little to be gained from doing the 64-bit thing. It's just a marketing ploy.
On 11/18/07, Ross Drummond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:13, Phill Coxon wrote: > > > > In other words - is there any point in my doing an apt-on-cd backup of > > all the updates I've installed to Ubuntu 7.10, or will every package > > have to be downloaded again as a 64bit version anyway? > > > > Thanks. > > This is not an exact answer to your question. > > I recently set up a 64bit computer with Gentoo. Gentoo is source based > distribution which downloads the source code and compiles the applications > on > the computer they are going to be used. This allows applications to > customised and optimised according to your wishes. > > I compiled my applications to run on 64 bit architecture setting one of the > compiler flags to; > > -march=x86-64 > > Not one of the GPL applications failed to compile. Some third party > applications which supply the executable rather than the source code require > 32bit emulation to run. > > Down at the silicon level computing is about manipulating numbers. So > anything > which allows these numbers to be processed in 64 as opposed to 32 bit chunks > has to be a good thing. > > My advice is go 64 bit as much as possible. > > Cheers Ross Drummond > -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell
