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Robin Cornelius wrote:
Well, I've started installing Gentoo 2005.1 (AMD64) on my Athlon 64. It seems very fast, not sure if thats due to the 64-bit code, the 1GB of memory or due to compiling from a Stage 1 installation.Hi guys, How can i take advantage of an athlon 64 processor.From what i can make out the Athlon 64 is a extended i386 instructionset so i presume there are a whole buch of 64 bit instructions avaiable. So if i compile my kernel with the athlon 64 processor selected the kernel can take advantage of the 64 bit instructions. Thats well and good but is there much in the kernel that will benifit from 64 bit? there are no floating point operations in kernel space, may be some data transferers can be more efficient and in reduced clock cycles? Its the apps and especialy number crunching/data processing that should benifit the most. I can't see any debain athlon64 sources so i assume i am stuck with i386 unless I want to compile everything (gentoo?) and i quite like debian and how things run at the moment anyway. In general terms the processor and MB change has made my linux system much faster even without 64 bit instructions. Linux still booted after the mb/processor change and I have a couple of small issues to do with hotplug/udev but everyhing is good now. Windows on the other hand went ape, it blue screened with in a second of attempting to boot, i had to run a recovery cd on XP to get it working again and now it seems to run even slower than before! Robin
I read somewhere that things like OpenOffice.org aren't usually any quicker but other number crunching applications are faster.
I think there is an unofficial port of Debian to AMD64. Other options are Fedora, CentOS Gentoo or Suse Linux, and I'm pretty sure Mandrake do an AMD64 port too as I'm sure there are other distros which have AMD64 ports.
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