Replies below...
On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Vince Weaver wrote:
[snip]
It's a shame to waste a 64 bit machine by running a 32-bit kernel on it.
With x86_64 you get some extra benefits; x86_64 code has 16-general purpose
register available isntead of the 8 in x86. So in theory your code could run
faster because of that. Also if any of your programs do 64 bit integer math,
running a 64-bit kernel instantly more than doubles the performance of all 64
bit ALU operations.
Well, the only other thing I was wondering about is that I might try to
re-compile and run a few programs I wrote using BLAS and LAPACK linear
algebra libraries. Now most of that should be floating point arithmatic,
but I wasn't sure if I'd see any significant benefit there from a 64-bit
OS and libraries.
In the end though, it doesn't matter how fast your machine is if it doesn't
run the apps you want to run.
Right, and that's really the main issue. This machine is primarily for
personal use and there are just certain things I want to be able to run.
Additionally, I'd rather not spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling
to get things to work.
[snip]
Vince
Thanks,
Nick
