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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.
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
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.