Why are still not at 64 bits

[Mark Komarinski]

Let's see what I can answer here, since I've been using FC5 & 6 on an
x64_64 (Intel) box at work for about 6 months, and my home machine runs
FC6 off-and-on with an AMD chip.

On 02/15/2007 12:55 AM, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Feb 14, 2007, at 22:22, Paul Lussier wrote:
>
>> I find it mind-boggling that the Alpha came out what, 16-18 years ago
>> with 64 bit technology and it *still* hasn't caught on in the
>> mainstream.  Why is that?
>
> I remember porting povray to the alpha back when they still called it
> OSF/1, and it was a minor bitch to get done and didn't really provide
> any benefit (other than it would compile).  I did learn how to bring
> the entire cs cluster to a crawl, though with my hacked up distributed
> computing system :) (Wayne, thanks for showing me 'nice').
>
> x86-64 actually has one additional benefit - in 64 bit mode you
> actually have enough registers on the chip such that the compiler can
> behave in a civilized manner and you don't have to keep storing
> addresses in main memory (or more likely its cache).  So, typical
> program execution gets faster on this one particular architecture -
> none of the others have this problem in 32-bit space.
>
> Things I don't know:
>   * are there outstanding driver issues on x86-64 with linux?
Not that I can see.  Each are pretty standard machines and all the
hardware that's in them is working.
>   * are there any gotchas with running 32-bit apps under a linux
> that's native to x86-64?
For FC, I haven't noticed.  Debian, on the other hand, has a different
way of handling 32 bit libraries that makes it a lot harder to work
with.  They recommend you create a full chroot environment to run 32 bit
apps.

The only problems I really have are using Flash and Java under
Firefox.   Since my employer probably doesn't like me starting at
youtube all day, I don't really miss it all that much, and I have
Windows XP running in VMWare that I can use in case I do need to go to a
flash site for whatever reason.

Other than the novelty of running a 64-bit OS, I haven't really noticed
anything different about this system over others.  I don't make use of
large memory applications (though I do have 4GB of RAM, so I could), I
don't notice a large performance boost.

OTOH, the cluster nodes I'm working with (dual core/dual CPU with 8GB
RAM) will see a benefit with a 64-bit OS.  Running an app like BLAST can
very quickly take up more than 2GB of RAM.