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AMD64 Windows vs. Fedora vs. SuSE benchmarks
Illissius writes "AnandTech just posted a review comparing 32- and 64-bit performance on both Linux and Windows. They focused on what is available out of the box without having to compile anything seperately - unfortunately, 64-bit binaries weren't available for most of the Windows benchmarks. To save people the pain of RTFA, there's a very tangible gain moving to 64-bitness, Linux wins some (MySQL, UT2004), and Windows wins some (rendering, RtCW)."
You should have read the article...
"Unfortunately, we had difficulties running our new hardware platform on Gentoo and Debian"
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
What factor of raw "speed" faster would a 64bit processor be over a standard 32bit processor of the same clock-speed. Do you think that is is currently economically viable for any purchases at all to be made of 64 bit computers other than for the stasis that comes with it: "I've got a 64 bit computer, ner :P"
Wouldn't that still contain a lot of debug code slowing things down, making it unfair in a comparison like this? Interesting to see the beta is even faster than the Linux distros in some cases though.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
If the reviewers had been serious they would have used an optimised distributions such as Gentoo, which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience, more than any current Linux distribution possibly could.
You mean like SuSE 9.1 64-bit edition that comes fully optimized and ready to run on a single DVD? Look, not to be a dick or anything, but Gentoo is in no way the "only sane" option for getting the most from your hardware. Yeah, it's far more oriented towrds optimizing for hardware than any other distro, but for me "sanity" means pop a DVD in, install, configure, and get to leave in under 60 minutes. That doesn't mean Gentoo is bad, it's a fun hacking distro and you can learn a hell of a lot more from using it than any binary distro, but it's certainly not a PHB compatible distro.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Thats exactly what I was thinking.
While I'm no fan of windows, much like others here, I do see the need to have a *fair* test, and at *many* points through the tests, I saw this:
"Again, we had to use 32-bit binaries for the Win-64 beta"
"Unfortunately, there is only a 32-bit version of the game, so we must settle with 32-bit performance benchmarks, even on our 64-bit platforms."
"We noticed the Windows XP 64-bit MySQL running slower than its 32-bit counterpart; unfortunately, this is due to the lack of a 64-bit Windows binary - we had to test using a 32-bit binary on the 64-bit platform. "
Therefore, who is going to be surprised that the windows benchmark for 32 and 64 bit performance under such apps is going to be nearly exactly the same?
Oh, and one last part. The writer of the article doesn't quite get that 64bit binarys *should* be faster than 32bit ones, with this little gem:
"Here shows another case of 64-bit optimized binaries working faster than 32-bit binaries"
We shall be sending him his qualification in the bleeding obvious soon.
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
This is an interesting quote, considering that Suse 64 beats WindowsXP 64 at PovRay rendering. FC2 beats Windows in 64 and 32 bit mode for Mental Ray rendering.
So, saying "Windows wins some (rendering..." is pretty subjective. Fedora is slower as is, in most cases, compared to Suse, as shown by the benchmarks (not surprising for Fedora). I find it strange that ET is slower on Linux than Windows, since most Q3 engine games are faster on Linux than Windows. Must have something to do with the way ET was specifically built or the nature of the OpenGL 32 bit code in the Linux nVidia 64 bit drivers.
Regardless, it still looks like Windows still isn't viable as a 64 bit OS. Given that Linux has better compilers for 64 bit code, more software that can take advantage of 64 bit (by nature of the the fact that most of it is free/opensource), and better 64 bit support in general, I think that it really shows that it is probably the best option for 64 bit at the moment. It could take *years* before most Windows software gets 64 bit variants. With Linux, it's all here now, aside from the handful of proprietary programs that many people don't run anyway. And since nVidia's 64 bit Linux drivers are still pretty immature (they only added 32 bit OpenGL support in June, in spite of it being a more capable 64 bit platform than Windows XP at the moment), expect some major gains in performance in the coming months, for the handful of games that you can play on Linux.
For 64-bit Fedora Core 2, we were not able to install NVIDIA's graphics driver with the default kernel. Thus, their 64-bit tests must be omitted from the benchmark.
If you install the updated FC2 kernel (any of them from the past month or two), nVidia's new 64-bit drivers install without trouble. I've been playing 64-bit UT2004 and tested 32-bit Wolfenstein:ET on my Athlon 64 3200+ box w/BFG GeForceFX 5900XTOC and suffice it to say that nVidia has done an OUTSTANDING job on their new drivers. I can't compare the 64-bit Linux version of UT2004 to the Windows version because I wiped Windows XP from the machine. If games don't run under Linux, well, I shouldn't waste time playing them anyhow. (I trust that Doom 3 will have a 64-bit Linux build?)
No, SuSE is the best AMD64 Linux. Why? Because of Andi Kleen. He's a linux kernel developer primarily focused on AMD64 and he works at SuSE. The Redhat distribution that came out before SuSE's doesn't run some IA32 binaries (my company's, for one), because, IMO, they didn't know what they were doing. SuSE waited until it was ready. Andi contributes lots of AMD64-specific fixes to the 2.6.x releases (according to the changelog's I read).
AMD64 is a new platform, and Andi is a really good developer. He's also been very helpful to a developer I work with, exchanging emails on AMD64 details for our compiler. I'm staying with SuSE for this reason.
Since the code for these benchmarks is available, it would have been really interesting (for me--as a developer/environmental modeler who compiles his own codes) to see what performance boost these compilers would have given (as compared with default "gcc" builds)... A lot more work, I'll admit.
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