Re: AMD Athlon64 Systems

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

> It is entirely clear that it is the AMD64-architecture that is broken
> for not providing a decent 32-bit mode.

Hardly. The 32bit performance of x86 is rather impressive compared to sparc
as well.

AMD64 works well in 64bit for several reasons one of the big ones being
that the instructions don't all expand to twice the size as risc ones tend
to. Modern RISC people are beginning to use compressors to keep the 
instruction stream down. X86 simply happens to be a very strange compressed
encoding nowdays, the CPU's haven't actually executed it directly for some
years