[olug] Advice on a new rig

[Christopher Cashell]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 10:40 PM, Luke Dashjr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> 3 GB is also the top limit for 32-bit x86 without some weird stuff. And 64-bit
> doesn't quite mix with 32-bit all that great. If you really need more than 3
> GB, you might want to seriously consider a non-x86 platform-- I know PowerPC
> and MIPS handle this decent (no, Windows won't run natively on either anymore,
> but XP won't be around much longer anyway).

I'm confused about why you would jump to PowerPC or MIPS for 64bit
support.  As much as I'm a fan of the PowerPC architecture, there is
*nothing* available in PowerPC or MIPS that can come anywhere close to
modern x86-64 CPU's when taking into account price, performance,
flexibility, and legacy support.

Linux running 64bit on x86-64 CPUs handle running 32bit code
significantly better than PowerPC or MIPS do, allowing you a lot more
flexibility.  Even if it "doesn't quite mix. . . all that great", it's
still significantly better than "can't run any 32bit x86 code at all,
period".  And, due to the popularity of Intel/AMD CPUs the
distributions tend to support x86-64 much better than PowerPC/MIPS.

Honestly though, 64bit is not necessarily required (depending on the
needs of the original poster).  Intel CPU's have supported PAE since
the Pentium Pro.  Linux has supported it for a long time, and the only
penalty is a few percent performance hit (often offset by the
increased memory available).  Windows supports it also, although
Microsoft locks XP/Vista to a maximum of 4GB of memory available.  The
only issue I've ever seen on Windows was a flaky driver when PAE was
enabled (a later release of the driver fixed it).

Personally, I'd sacrifice a little disk space and CPU speed for
additional memory in most cases, especially with Linux.  Even if
you're not using it directly, you're benefiting from it as disk cache.
 At the same time, all of my Linux boxes that have 64bit capable
hardware (currently all x86-64) are running 64bit Linux (whether they
have more than 4GB or RAM, or not).

-- 
Christopher