Fedora Core 1 For AMD64 test1 Available

DrFishstik writes "From the Fedora Project Page: "A test release of Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Like the original x86 architecture release, the AMD64 architecture has three binary ISO images and three source ISO images. This is a single (we hope and intend) test release specifically to check hardware support; the package set is the same versions as an updated Fedora Core 1 for x86 system will have.""

Comments

Re:Benchmarks!

[turgid]

(obviously it's useful to break the 4GB barrier, but does it also improve speed?)

Yes, it does improve speed because in breaking the 4GB barrier, you now can process huge data sets without segmenting.

However, in 64-bit mode, there are also twice as many registers which makes for a heck of a speed improvement. Obviously legacy 32-bit code can't use the extra registers because is isn't written to use them, but a 64-bit opearating system kernel can, which improves speed there in many instances. There is an extra penalty on context switches, but this is far outweighed by the benefits.

As for benchmarks, there have been many unofficial performance comparisons. Google is your friend. As a general rule-of-thumb, the 64-bit Opteron is about 10-30% faster on legacy code than the Athlon XP. That's on a 32-bit kernel (that doesn't know about the extra registers).

Unofficially, I could tell you some performance numbers, but I fear the Men in Black.