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On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 09:34:52 +0100 Robin Cornelius wrote: > > 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 instruction > set 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 If I remember rightly, Ubuntu has an AMD64bit version about, so you can have an almost-Debian system! Grant. -- Unix: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html