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64-bit Toys for Athlon-64?

Posted by Cliff on from the lead-foot-throttle-up dept.

gbulmash asks: "I'm looking to see just how much performance I can squeeze out of a new Athlon-64 system. This isn't for benchmarking, but more like you got a new car and you're looking for a long, straight road where you can push the needles into the red before letting off the gas (and then maybe a twisty mountain road to test cornering). Can the all-knowing Slashdot readers recommend some AMD-64 enabled/optimized distros and packages that will let us new proud papas of AMD-64 systems fully open up the throttle on these bad girls and see what they're made of?"

4 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Well, by Sevn · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can build a Gentoo system completely optimized for AMD64 with help from this page:

    http://dev.gentoo.org/~brad_mssw/amd64-tech-notes. html

    T-Minus 10 second and counting til someone starts bashing Gentoo and recommending Debian.

    --
    For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
  2. Not much by MerlynEmrys67 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Ok, there are a few applications that 64 bits really help - some public key cryptography, and any application that has a process space over 4 GB (ok really 3 - but that is another story)

    actually I don't know this... does Athlon 64 have a 64 bit x 64 bit = 128 bit result operation ?

    The other applications that do really well with more memory are database type operations, where you are caching 16 GB of tables in memory so you don't have to go to disk (note, yes this means you need about 20 GB of RAM on the system)

    Have fun

    --
    I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
  3. An easy easy answer. by tvadakia · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://www.x86-64.org/ There's a lot of info there. Have fun.

    --
    Unique.
  4. SUSE for AMD64 by jfunk · · Score: 2, Informative

    SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 has been around for a long time. That's why it was used in all of those Opteron benchmarks after it was released.

    For something a little more affordable, SUSE 9.0 for AMD64 will be released tomorrow. (Along with the IA32 version I preordered)

    For a no-cost alternative, you can download all 9 ISOs for the SUSE 8.2 for AMD64 beta here.