Is 64 bit Fedora OK? With which CPU?

Jonathan Berry berryja at gmail.com
Mon Jan 2 01:54:12 UTC 2006


On 1/1/06, dondi_2006 <dondi_2006 at libero.it> wrote:
> Dave wrote:
>
> > The x86-64 architecture brings a bunch of additional features/
> > optimisations in addition to an enlarged address space.
>
> Very interesting! Which ones? Where are they discussed? Above all,
> are they important for power desktop users?

There are 16 general purpose registers rather than just the 8 in
32-bit mode.  This means registers do not have to be pushed to the
stack as often, resulting in fewer memory accesses, improving
performance.  I think that is the major one.

A simple test with Blender (www.blender3d.com) a while back resulted
in greater than 2x performance (took less than half the time)
rendering an animation when using 64-bit Blender in 64-bit Fedora over
32-bit.  I actually used Windows for the 32-bit version, I guess I
really ought to test 32-bit program in 64/32-bit Linux as well, but
just the magnitude of the improvement is impressive.
In general things that require a lot of processing will probably see a
significant performance boost.  Interactive things (email, web
browsing) can be done well on a fairly old machine because humans are
slow (comparatively), so of course you won't really notice anything
there.

As far as processors/chipsets: AMD and nForce4.  I have an Athlon 64
3500+ and an nForce4 based Gigabyte motherboard and they seem to work
great with FC4 x86_64.  Athlon 64s support frequency scaling (which
you wanted), though I have not seen it do any (noticeable) CPU fan
speed adjustments (using stock fan).  But overall it is pretty quiet. 
Not silent but much quieter than my previous system (Athlon XP).  Some
noise is from the graphics card (nVidia GeForce 6600 GT) and you could
probably stick with a fan-less one if you don't need great 3D
graphics.

Jonathan




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