Are You Switching to 64-bit Processors?

chip_whisperer asks: "I used to be a big time custom desktop builder, making many working boxes per year, but I've been off the bandwagon for about four years now and am trying to get back into it now that Ars Technica has just released their recommendations. The standard seems to be heading towards 64-bit processors, but I'm wondering if it worth it to run a box on XP-64? I've heard that driver support for 64-bit processors can be a hassle. Also, for you fellow Linux geeks, how are current distros (like Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, and others) doing in supporting 64 bit processors?"

Comments

Make a list

[traindirector]

Make a list of what XP-64 will do for you that XP won't. If there's anything on that list that really entices you, consider XP-64. If not, forget it, and go along your merry way. XP-64 is guaranteed to give you more driver problems than XP, so if there are no added benefits in using it (which there probably aren't for you, unless you want to use over 2GB of memory), there's no reason for the headache.

Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.

Re:Make a list

[Anonymous Coward]

Make a list of what XP-64 will do for you that XP won't. If there's anything on that list that really entices you, consider XP-64. If not, forget it, and go along your merry way.

I have to agree with the other post who said "who cares about XP". I've been using 64-bit gentoo for maybe 2 years now (something like that), without driver issues.

Also, instead of just making a list of what 64 bits will do for you NOW, you should consider the fact you'll have your computer for a number of years. What might you need 64 bits for in the future?

Re:Make a list

[Mark-Allen]

I am currently running my new Compaq laptop (nx6325) with Vista RTM 64-Bit. Installed in 20 minutes, and found all hardware. It has a Dual-Core 2GHz Athalon and runs pretty good. But the base 1GB is not sufficient so I immediately ordered another 1GB for CHF 220.00 (about USD 183.00). The 2GB modules are still over CHF 1,000.00 so I'll wait for now.

The default apps and such defaulted to the 32-bit versions, so I had to make some changes to the paths but after that all works well. It has been running non-stop for over 7 days, without a single problem. Actually, I haven't rebooted it at all after the installation, so I haven't much experience. This evening I ran through Windows Update and it updated a few things, but didn't require a reboot which was surprising.

The speed isn't bad for a 64-bit system but Vista is ram-hungry, so I won't be able to see much improvement until I add the extra memory.

In the future, I will not buy anymore new 32-bit systems, only 64-bit. I will, however, continue to check out vintage 32-bit systems for a good price, if necessary. At Christmas, Santa Clause is bringing me 2 DL-360s, which he only paid Euro 250.00 each. I'll use these for W2K3, and all the server-related apps.

But the future is 64-bit and so far, so good.

Just my 2 centimes,

Mark-Allen

Re:Make a list

[Planesdragon]

Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.

Maybe, if the drivers ever come up to snuff in the first place. I do have a 64-bit CPU in my laptop that, at the moment, is just doing 32-bit jumping jacks.

(And as I do not intend to buy music with MS's DRM, I really don't see what you think Vista will keep me from doing with my own computer that, say, regular old XP doesn't do.)

Re:Make a list

[Phil John]

Vista is more RAM hungry than XP, but not by a vast amount.

If you see that you have very little free memory, this is probably because Vista has a completely new memory management system that learns the apps you most often use and pre-loads them into RAM to speed things up. As soon as you actually need any of that memory it starts unloading things.

Granted, 1 gig won't really cut it if you're using Visual Studio or SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (that's why I'm still on XP - plus I'm waiting on SP2 for SQL Server for Vista Compat), but for most tasks and gaming 1 gig will still be ample.

Re:Make a list

[ottothecow]

I've been switching to 64-bit processors since the month the clawhammer core was released. The box I am typing this on is an A64-3200+ (commemoratively named hammertime). Its a socket 768 with AGP which has severely hurt my upgrade options (although it was fine at the time of purchase). At that time even in 32bit mode they provided better preformance for the price than the intel chips and they had the ability to go 64 when needed. Everything I have built for people since has been 64...it just makes sense.

XP-64 doesnt matter. It kinda sucks and I dont use it on this box. If I wanted a 64bit, I would boot linux and be confidant in the fact that it would run just as well as it does on my 32bit linux box (unlike XP where there are huge differances)

Re:Make a list

[BenoitRen]

But have you compared it to performance on 32-bit?

64-bit is mostly a fad right now, it doesn't really run faster or more efficient.

Re:Make a list

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. 7 days uptime for a windows box! Must be a record.

Re:Make a list

[Dakman]

"which there probably aren't for you, unless you want to use over 2GB of memory"

Don't you mean 4GB? Last time I checked 256^(32/8) == 4294967296 or 4GB :/

Re:Make a list

[traindirector]

Don't you mean 4GB? Last time I checked 256^(32/8) == 4294967296 or 4GB :/

4GB is the amount of addressable memory, but that number doesn't take into account the way Windows handles that memory. Because of the way its memory management scheme works, 32-bit Windows can only address a total of 2GB of kernel memory and 2GB of memory for a single application. With 4GB of memory, a single application could not access 3GB. Additionally, the limitation of 2GB of kernel memory poses problems for terminal servers and other applications that may use more than 2GB of kernel memory. See The 4GB Windows Memory Limit: What does it really mean? for more information.

My point in recommending the consideration of 64-bit Windows for amounts of memory over 2GB is that you may start to run into these limitations in 32-bit Windows with over 2GB of memory. If you actually have a reason for putting more than 2GB of memory in your computer, these limitations, and a 64-bit operating system, are things worth considering depending on your application.

Re:Make a list

[ultranova]

"which there probably aren't for you, unless you want to use over 2GB of memory"

Don't you mean 4GB? Last time I checked 256^(32/8) == 4294967296 or 4GB :/

Remember, if the kernel is in the same address space than the user program, it needs a large enough piece of the address space to map all physical memory. In other words, if you have 2GB of RAM, the address space of 4GB gets split into 2GB kernel and 2GB user program; if you have 3GB of RAM, the user program can only have 1GB of address space since the kernel now needs 3GB.

There are ways around this - namely, don't keep all physical memory permanently mapped by the kernel, but rather have a small window and change memory mappings to make it point to whatever physical page you need - but they add overhead. A 64-bit processor shouldn't have such problems, having many orders of magnitude greater address space than it is possible to connect physical RAM to it in the foreseeable future.

In fact the default mapping in Linux is to use 768 MB chunk for the kernel, so the currently popular 1GB machine would already start feeling the hit with the default settings...

Re:Make a list

[abradsn]

The same was true from 16 to 32 bit. Basically, software has to take advantage of a relatively minor increase in technology for you to notice the difference. It will be awhile before that happens.

Re:Make a list

[BenoitRen]

True. However, back in the day, we needed 32 bits. Programs were already stacking 16-bit variables to get 32-bits variables, of which 22 to 24 were used (I read this on Slashdot a while back). We needed more storage because of the upcoming of multimedia on the PC, and thus more memory addressing.

This isn't the case now. Only corporate super computers who need to handle really large databases need 64 bits to work efficiently.

Re:Make a list

[Anonymous Coward]

Where, oh, where did the term Athalons come from? It annoys the heck outta me.

Re:Make a list

[Mark-Allen]

Actually, I made a mistake. The processor is an "AMD Turion 64 x2".

But I really wouldn't know the difference even if they hit me in the head. But it does seem to work well.

Mark-Allen

Re:Make a list

[jimicus]

The 64 bit version probably will be more RAM hungry. All that nice 64-bit goodness uses 64-bit pointers and 64-bit ints, thus needing twice the RAM for many of the more common data types.

Re:Make a list

[hackstraw]

Make a list of what XP-64 will do for you that XP won't.

Actually, its probably easier to make a list of what XP-64 won't do for you.

This 32-64 bit thing is funny. For one thing, I've been using 64bit machines for almost 10 years. I've only really needed them in the past 5 years.

Basically if you don't need single processes over 4 Gigs of RAM, and you don't need system memory over 12 Gigs or whatever the upper limit has been hacked onto 32 bit systems, AND you are willing to pay for that much RAM (which excludes 99% of slashdotters right there), then you do not need a 64bit system.

Re:Make a list

[cnettel]

Nope, the 32-bit address space is already broken up by assumptions made long ago by library and OS writers, making the longest continuous areas available much smaller. This can be even more true in a managed environment, like Java or .NET. If you have to jump through all kinds of tricks just to be able to address all the RAM you need, then you have a real problem, and we're hitting that problem with 32-bit right now. There are lots of places where code could be made simpler if we could just mmap in all the file data we want, but that's not possible right now even for quite modest file sizes.

Re:Make a list

[Anonymous Coward]

64-bit DOS screams!

Re:Make a list

[Anonymous Coward]

Advantages over XP 32bit?
Well, for one, can address more memory and is based off Windows Server 2003, not Windows 2000, which is much more robust.

For over a year, the only problem I had was with my MX300 mouse. Logitech just drops support for older mice in favor of their new offerings.
Even the Audigy 2 worked flawlessly.

Re:Make a list

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto! My current laptop is 64bit with dual boot gentoo (64bit) and Win2K (32bit). Happy happy happy, and ready for the future! Just my 2 cents.

Re:Make a list

[Anonymous Coward]

would going to 64 bit solve these problems, though?

Re:Make a list

[wolf08]

And I have to agree with you. I've also been using 64bit gentoo for 2 years. It runs extremely well, and I've only had one (minor) problem with game server software (Mangos) that I don't even need running on it anyway. I like that gentoo makes it stupidly easy to run 64bit systems; I don't normally have to worry about what I compile, and because of the 32bit libraries installed, if I do have a problem, I don't have to set up a chroot or anything.

Re:Make a list

[kasperd]

In fact the default mapping in Linux is to use 768 MB chunk for the kernel

Actually 1GB is used for the kernel, but only 896MB of that is used for a mapping of physical RAM. The last 128MB is reserved for other purposes.

Why would I?

[NineNine]

This is kind of a dumb question. If you need the processing power, then switch. If not, then don't.

I have no need for 64 bit processing in my business (retail and web). Computer upgrades have to be worth it, from a financial standpoint. There's no reason for my business to spend any money on 64 bit processors.

Re:Why would I?

[LiquidCoooled]

But aren't most processors now 64bit?
Isn't it economically cheaper to get a 64bit chip even if you don't use a 64bit OS?

Re:Why would I?

[Fry-kun]

Your processing power won't improve at all by switching to x64. The only improvement is that you will be able to address more RAM and HD space, nothing else.
In fact, you will even lose out - 64 bit systems waste more memory than 32 bit systems. That's primarily because the 32-bit structures take up 64 bits on 64 bit system, while not carrying any more data. And all the pointers are suddenly 64 bit in length, etc.
In other words, it's worth switching only if you have and plan to use a reasonably larger amount of RAM/HD space than the 32 bit max limit. (in other words, if you want to switch to use 5gb, i'd recommend sticking with 32 bit system, but for 6gb or 8gb the pros start outweighing the cons)

Re:Why would I?

[WalksOnDirt]

Most programs run at about the same speed, but some programs gain a lot from running in 64 bit mode.

One example is that bit-board chess engines, including the current top engine Rybka, are much faster. Non bit-board engines gain little or are slower (The extra registers! They do nothing! Or at least not enough to do more than make up for the code bloat).

Large number arithmetic (e.g. encryption) gains even more because one 64 bit multiply does more that twice the work of a 32 bit multiply.

Re:Why would I?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's primarily because the 32-bit structures take up 64 bits on 64 bit system, while not carrying any more data.

I can't speak for x86-64 because I've never seen it, but I've played around with 64-bit PowerPC, and that's really not true. Or not necessarily, anyway. Note that in 64-bit PowerPC, there are no "modes"; all registers are 64 bits in width. However, that doesn't stop 32-bit code from running unmodified.

Basically what it comes down to is: it's not the size of your register; it's the size of your load/store. Having 64-bit registers doesn't stop you from doing a "store word" (32-bit store). It would even be somewhat natural to have 48-bit pointers if you wanted. What defines the size of data in your data structures is what conventions you (as an assembly programmer) decide for your loads and stores. As a C programmer, of course, it then comes down to your compiler implementation. On OS X, anyway, the convention is to use 32-bit pointers in 64-bit code.

So it's misleading to say everything is 64 bits in size. You get to play around with 64 bits when it's in your register, but that doesn't dictate how much memory you'll consume.

Re:Why would I?

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD64 has more registers available. In real world situations the extra 8 general purpose registers effectively triple the usable register set on x86 - this can lead to having fewer loads and stores to the cache which clearly will improve performance.

Some algorithms can be sped up greatly by using 64-bit integers instead of 32-bit integers. OTOH one such class of algorithms, encryption/hashing, is improved even better by on-chip hardware implementations like in the VIA C3/C7 chips.

It shouldn't affect HD space, only the filesystem code which can now use a single 64-bit int, instead of two 32-bit ints to simulate 64-bit capacities. Most filesystems have supported >4GB filesystems for many a year.

Pointers in AMD64 are 48bits IIRC, even though it is 64-bit overall. I may be wrong here, but AMD64 can only virtually address 48-bits anyway (at least in the current implementations) so they didn't want to waste space needlessly. It also doesn't stop you using 32-bit integers where they are sensible.

Re:Why would I?

[bubbl07]

Basically what it comes down to is: it's not the size of your register; it's the size of your load/store.

Yea, you try explaining that to my girlfriend.

Re:Why would I?

[Burdell]

IIRC, the processing power can increase if you run 64 bit apps, because the 64 bit extensions include more registers (which means fewer loads and stores to RAM). 32 vs. 64 bit doesn't affect how much hard drive space you can address, as modern OSes all address >32 bit files already (unless you are still running FAT32).

Also, for the most part, 32 bit structures do NOT take up 64 bits on a 64 bit arch. An int is still 32 bits, and I believe both AMD and Intel can handle (without extra overhead) 32 bit aligned reads of 32 bit data (so no padding is required). Pointers of course are larger, but they do carry more information (with a larger virtual address space, arranging different things in RAM is easier).

Re:Why would I?

[Chandon Seldon]

That's true for Sparc64. Not so much for amd64.

Doubling the number of general purpose registers is nothing to scoff at. Software that takes advantage of that can easily get a noticeable performance jump. Further, the only thing that should reliably be taking up more memory is pointers - x86 & amd64 don't have significant alignment issues like RISC processors, so they can handle short data (i.e. 32 or even 16 bit integers) all day long.

Re:Why would I?

[Fry-kun]

I didn't know that there are twice as many registers in 64bit version. Of course that's only effective for applications compiled to run natively in 64 bit, not 32 bit guest applications... but I see your point.

Re:Why would I?

[tricorn]

If it's that important to save some memory by using 32-bit pointers (and you don't need a 64-bit process address space), then it seems to me it should be pretty easy to compile to code that only uses 32-bit pointers, even with 64-bit code. It shouldn't be hard to mark a process as only having a 32-bit address space so the kernel memory allocation calls don't allocate anything outside of that range (as they'd have to do with 32-bit code anyway). Doesn't GCC support having 64-bit code with 32-bit pointers?

I've been using 64-bit processors for over 10 years, but the Wintel monopoly keeps burying them, damn it, and damn you Compaq and Hewlett-Packard! And Digital. And Apple. Before that I was using 60-bit processors with an 18-bit address space (and one's complement arithmetic, if you needed a further hint).

Re:Why would I?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me an hour or two with her and she won't be bothering you anymore. Ever.

Re:Why would I?

[sowth]

Yes, but if he doesn't need an upgrade, then it is much cheaper to not buy any hardware at all. ;-)

Re:Why would I?

[kestasjk]

*Rushes out to get a 64-bit processor, to be able to play games with bit-board chess AI faster!*

Re:Why would I?

[TheRaven64]

Your processing power won't improve at all by switching to x64. The only improvement is that you will be able to address more RAM and HD space, nothing else This is not really true. On x86, you get a bunch of extra general purpose registers when you switch to x86-64, making the architecture only very register-starved, as opposed to insanely register-starved. If you are running Lisp code, for example, then this can give a huge performance gain, since existing Lisp compilers work far better on architectures with a lot of registers (on SPARC or PowerPC, Lisp code compiled with the Steel Bank Common Lisp compiler tends to out-perform C++ code implementing the same algorithms. On x86, this is not the case). The same is likely to apply to Java, since it uses a similar structure for its byte-code. If you are primarily running C-family code, then the compiler will be able to reduce register-spill onto the stack more effectively.

Oh, and with the exception of pointers, no data has to become 64-bit. You can keep all of your integers and floats as 32-bit quantities. A decent malloc implementation could even allow you to specify that you only wanted memory in the lower 4GB of your address space, allowing small programs to keep 32-bit pointers for that extra tiny bit of speed.

Re:Why would I?

[mathew7]

Speedups from switching all come from compiler. Even 32-bit Intel (I don't know about AMD) use register-renaming (and support many registers, not just what compiler assigns), but they are used only for out-of-order processing. It still uses cpu-memory load/stores, which are slower even if it's in L1 cache. With x86-64, the compiler can optimize the code by using more (and bigger) registers, so cache (or worst, memory) access is reduced. So, like from the 386/486, the compiler is a major speed factor.

Re:Why would I?

[mathew7]

I forgot to say that aligning is not an issue with modern processors because of big caches. It counted for older processors because they accessed the memory directly, so they needed 16/32bit aligning. But today, the cache reads like 8-bytes (aligned) at a time, and from L1 cache you can retrieve any byte/word, with no worries about alignment. Where alignment counts is big structures+arrays, where the compiler can do nothing and you have to optimize your code/design yourself.

Re:Why would I?

[6Yankee]

It'd take a while... use a lot of breath... in fact, by the time I'd finished, she'd probably be fully inflated!

Re:Why would I?

[Chaostrophy]

This was generally true for sane 32bit designs, ie RISC, though some things like databases got big speed boosts. x86 is a whole nother ball game, over time (current systems still have a heavy focus on 32 bit performance), I'd expect 64 bit performance to become dramatically better than 32 bit on the same CPU.

Re:Why would I?

[slysithesuperspy]

64 bit mode has more registers which speeds up some things.

Re:Why would I?

[Nevyn]

A decent malloc implementation could even allow you to specify that you only wanted memory in the lower 4GB of your address space, allowing small programs to keep 32-bit pointers for that extra tiny bit of speed.

Given that x86-64 runs x86 just fine, and there is a compiler flag to compiler with that, I don't see why you'd hack malloc() in that way.

Re:Why would I?

[Half a dent]

64bit would feasibly be helpful to us for CAD work but on testing I found we had too much older software that just didn't work with it. So until we upgrade our ERP software it just isn't going to happen for us. Shame as it did seem to speed up our 3D CAD on the test PC.

Re:Why would I?

[Chandon Seldon]

Yea, that would have been pretty easy. It wasn't that important though, so they didn't do it. If it were *really* that important you could store short pointer offsets and calculate addresses manually.

Re:Why would I?

[hackstraw]

*Rushes out to get a 64-bit processor, to be able to play games with bit-board chess AI faster!*

Funny, but being that a chess board is 8*8 or 64 and it is faster doing calculations with 64bit ints directly is basically the way to do it.

Re:Why would I?

[jernejk]

So how do java / .net compilers handle 64bit processors? Do they know how to use the new registers? And what does integer mean on 64bit platform? int32 or int64?

Gentoo's pretty well along

[bssteph]

Can't speak for the other distros, but Gentoo has very good 64-bit support, and it seems that a lot of people feel it is one of the best at it. Both AMD64 and EM64T are supported with the "amd64" arch, so don't get put off by their docs.

You can build pretty much all of your standard desktop software in native 64-bit mode, with some exceptions (generally game console emulators and other games [closed source or sometimes even open source, unfortunately], certain media libraries, and browser plugins), but Gentoo also makes the 32-bit emulation libraries pretty painless to install and use. I've had an AMD64 desktop on ~amd64 for over a year now, and it's been smooth sailing (as far as Gentoo can be considered smooth sailing).

So, as far as Gentoo goes, 64-bit is fine for most things, but if you need some specific software, skip it for now and install using x86 media (which will run the system in 32-bit mode). Example: I run a spare Pentium D mid-tower in 32-bit just because zSNES has been so fragile on my desktop.

Re:Gentoo's pretty well along

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I concur. MY office switched to Gentoo 64 bit for our new data center. It works great. No problems with anything we've tried. IF, and thats looking like a huge if at this point, I use vista for anything it won't be for a couple years hopefully the drive situation will be ironed out by then. I'll have to see exactly what happens with the whole drm thing. I personally don't mind the current state of windows drm for wma, but if they reduce the functionality of my computer to prevent me from potentially doing illegal things, while preventing me from doing the idiosyncratic, but legal things I want to do, then forget it.

Re:Gentoo's pretty well along

[Toba82]

I personally don't mind the current state of windows drm for wma, but if they reduce the functionality of my computer to prevent me from potentially doing illegal things, while preventing me from doing the idiosyncratic, but legal things I want to do, then forget it.

I prefer allowing my conscience to prevent me from doing the wrong thing. It's about the locus of control, really.

XP-64

[Nimey]

I don't think it's worth it to run XP64 yet unless you have a needed 64-bit app. Driver support still isn't great, mainly.

Re:XP-64

[blincoln]

Driver support still isn't great, mainly.

Yep.

We got Vista in for testing at work, so I jumped at the chance to try a 64-bit Windows on my home machine and see what difference it made.

I got it installed, but it didn't recognize my Linksys wireless card. I went to the Linksys website and they don't offer one either. There was a user-provided set of instructions for using the OEM drivers from the actual hardware vendor, but they didn't work for me.

I'd need a 50+ foot-long cat 5 cable to connect to my router, and that's too much of a hassle, so that was the end of Vista 64-bit testing for me.

XP-64

[aitikin]

Whatever the proper name of it, it sucks. There's next to no improvement over standard XP. That being said, Vista is supposed to have massive improvements. I don't know about any of that though, suse, ubuntu, debian, gentoo, pretty much all the regular distros you hear of have a 64-bit variant and most if not all work well. The beauty of the current 64-bit processors though is you can always run 32-bit code as well. So why not get a 64-bit proc?

Indeed

[WilliamSChips]

I can't remember whether I have it set to amd64 or ~amd64 though.

Re:Indeed

[Metasquares]

I'm using ~amd64 and have had no problems whatsoever related to 64-bit compatibility (though if I wanted to install a 32-bit driver, that could change). A few apps, such as Firefox, needed to be 32-bit because of things like the Flash plugin, but for the most part everything is 64-bit.

It's natural that Gentoo would be good at this, considering it's a source-based distribution.

Re:Indeed

[FictionPimp]

I had good luck using the nspluginwrapper to use 64bit firefox and 32bit plugins.

64-bit Linux

[huckda]

Quite frankly it's been very solid for me at the server level. Thanks to a bunch of other folk's hard work.
NT's 64 bit code for the old DEC Alpha's was much better than XP-64 IMO...
But I have yet to be putting this onto a desktop...the 32-bit is plenty fast enough for desktops, and for MY and my customer's usages...64-bit OS is overkill...

My experiences

[dakrin9]

I've been running 64-bit Windows 2003 server for almost a year now at work. At first I had some driver problems, but soon after the respective companies released 64-bit versions of their products. Since then i've had absolutely no problems with anything i've cared to run. On the other hand i'm not sure exactly how much of a performance boost i'm getting running a 64-bit OS. One thing i did notice was that visual studio compiled MUCH faster on the 64-bit system than my 32-bit system (the 32-bit system being much more powerful hardware wise), but that could just be a coincidence. I'd say go for it.

um. 32 bit?

[sporkme]

Using Gmail and flash can be interesting for a 64-bit Linux distro - Mozilla just crashes. I don't know if there is a better fix for this but that is because what I have been doing has Just Worked(TM) since I figured it out, and it was the only way to do it back then. I dug and dug and found that forcing 32-bit flash to run in a 32-bit browser on a 64-bit platform was the way to go.

Here is my posted solution on LinuxForums, in case anyone has had the Mozilla-Gmail-flash problem... but I expect that this has been solved differently.

I can't think of a single reason to *not* use a 64 bit processor in a new machine. Upgrade ability and the availability of components pretty much makes this a no-brainer.

switched already

[Keruo]

I switched all my boxes to 64bit at spring.
Only 32-bit systems left are my laptops and I'm not in hurry to replace those.
After selling the old components, I was left to pay $50-100 per system for the upgrade.

As for XP-64, don't bother, its utter crap. No drivers whatsoever, and the ones you can find are buggy as hell.
If you want 64bit win, you'll have to wait for vista.

For linux, I'd recommend gentoo, but if you're unsure and don't want to compile the entire system, suse or ubuntu works aswell.

Re:switched already

[Anonymous Coward]

As for XP-64, don't bother, its utter crap. No drivers whatsoever, and the ones you can find are buggy as hell.
If you want 64bit win, you'll have to wait for vista.

When did you last check? When I first installed x64 nearly a year ago, the only driver I couldn't find was for the sound card built in to the motherboard. Those have since materialized, and I've had no problems with stability.

Re:switched already

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have either a) crap hardware or b) hardware outmoded by a decade or more.

XP x64 for over a year now.

nVidia has perfectly sound drivers. (Can't speak for ATI.) Creative has perfectly sound (haha, pun!) drivers. I've yet to encounter a NIC that had a driver issue. I've yet to encounter driver problems wrt SATA. My printer, which is old(tm), has drivers.

The only driver problem I have is with my archaic, six year old digital camera. I can't exactly fault Windows for this, nor can I really fault the manufacturer for not writing drivers for a six year old camera.

Re:switched already

[Keruo]

I tried the xp64 in march 06, intel cpu, asus motherboard.
Xp failed to recognize the sata controller, gigabit nic and scsi controller(new adaptec card).

I also tried xp64 on 64bit amd at same time. On that system everything pretty much worked, but I still ended up replacing it with gentoo.
Main reason being, I had only time limited license so I would've had to reinstall in few months anyways.

Not right now

[Hexedian]

If you're building boxes for friends or customers, you'll want to consider the fact that Macromedia has not released a 64-bits version of Flash player, meaning users have to use a 32-bits browser to see flash animations. You don't start appreciating having flash around until you load the latest YouTube movie.

Re:Not right now

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't start appreciating having flash around until you load the latest YouTube movie.

Why? Did VideoDL start requiring flash?

Re:Not right now

[Ant P.]

No need. The Unplug extension and mplayer does the job just as well.

I switched to a 64 bit

[From A Far Away Land]

I bought a Turion AMD 64 a few months ago. I installed Ubuntu 64bit onto it, and then learned that there is less software out there, and that route is not for Linux noobs like I am. So I installed 32 bit instead.

Thank goodness for Automatix for Ubuntu.

Re:I switched to a 64 bit

[ztransform]

I tried installing Ubuntu 64-bit (amd64) 6.06LTS onto a Dell Precision 690 (dual duo-core processors). Was fine except it couldn't find the drivers for the SAS drives I were using. But Ubuntu 6.10 installed great straight off the disc!

A point to note, 64-bit Macromedia Flash for linux isn't out yet - so one has to do something tricky, like install nspluginwrapper (http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/projects/nsplug inwrapper) that allows the use of 32-bit plugins for Firefox.

Apart from that all the standard 64-bit apps for linux work fine!

Re:I switched to a 64 bit

[Zontar The Mindless]

I just bought a Turion AMD64 laptop a couple of weeks ago. I'm dual-booting 64-bit OpenSuSE 10.2 and Windows XP Pro 64. Only problem has been with wireless. (Thank you, Acer, for including a wireless card for which there are apparently no 64-bit drivers.)

Wireless with Win64 was solved with a Gigabyte GN-WB01GS USB dongle. The 64-bit driver's on the CD, which won't autorun and complains that "this CD is for a different format than what your computer uses" or some such garbage. Open it in Windows Explorer, navigate to the Utility folder, and run setup.exe, however, and it offers to install the 64-bit driver.

Wireless for the Linux side I'm still working on. I use ndiswrapper to run the Broadcom card that came with my 32-bit Acer laptop, and it works a treat there, but doesn't seem to do so for the card in the 64-bit machine. It also doesn't work for anything USB (silly me).

The GN-WB01GS (supposedly) uses an RT2570 chipset, for which a Linux driver is available courtesy of the rt2x00 Project. Their source built fine once I remembered to put a symlink in my /lib/modules/2.6.18-2.34-default/build directory. The driver loads (at least modprobe says it does), but nothing shows up in iwconfig.

I may just wind up buying another WiFi card. Otherwise, no complaints here.

Re:I switched to a 64 bit

[mad.frog]

64-bit Macromedia Flash for linux isn't out yet

64-bit Adobe (RIP, "Macromedia") Flash isn't out for any platform yet.

But they're working on it.

Re:I switched to a 64 bit

[Zontar The Mindless]

I assumed the WiFi card was a Broadcomm, but it's an Atheros. I may be in luck, after all.

64-bit Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Has been great, apart from continuously failing software raid, I didn't test this with a desktop.

64-bit FreeBSD has been wonderful, but I never ran that in a desktop either.

That leaves 64-bit Mac OS X - which isn't truly 64-bit IIRC, only in the Unix layers, not the desktop layers. The next release should (will?) fix that. And Windows, which appears to work apart from lacking 64-bit drivers and 64-bit key tools/applications/functions.

On Linux, just go for it

[Ed Avis]

Linux has supported x86-64 for years now. The recent versions of Fedora and other distributions have perfectly usable 64-bit versions. The few remaining bits and pieces like OpenOffice have been fixed. (If you run proprietary software such as the Flash player it may be a different story.)

In any case what sort of question is this? Should you buy a recent processor like the Athlon 64s AMD have been selling for ages, or the Intel chips on the market for almost as long? Well, yes of course. What half-decent i386-compatible processor sold these days doesn't support the 64-bit mode?

Re:On Linux, just go for it

[Mad Merlin]

What half-decent i386-compatible processor sold these days doesn't support the 64-bit mode?

Core Duo and Core Solo.

Re:On Linux, just go for it

[Ed Avis]

Core Duo doesn't do x86_64? Holy crap! Thanks for the correction, I just automatically assumed Intel would include it... especially since these processors are used by Apple, and it would be mad for Apple to step back from 64-bit PowerPC to 32-bit i386 just as several gigabytes of memory becomes common... um... wouldn't it?

What about the Core 2 Duo?

Re:On Linux, just go for it

[Mad Merlin]

The Core 2 Duo does support 64-bit, that's one of the main differences between it and the Core 1 Duo.

Linux is fine

[Goalie_Ca]

I've been running 64-bit linux on my very low power amd64 system (idles in the 30 C's :D) for about a year and a half now. Linux has pretty much been flawless for a while since AMD has been working to get support ready since before it ever came out. The biggest problem in open source was doing pointer math using ints. In terms of closed source software flash needs 32-bit emulation, java64 runs fine but there's no firefox plugin (why!?!?). And of course the win32 codecs are all win32 :P But I've gotten all those things to work in the 64-bit environment wihtout using a chroot by following one of the thousands of guides.

On the server, yes.

[j1mmy]

I wouldn't recommend a 32-bit processor for server use anymore. Linux support for 64-bit processors is as good as any other platform these days. The only caveat is that it's difficult to find pre-built binaries for Itanium2 anywhere.

Not so sure about the desktop. My desktop needs are pretty basic, so I haven't thought about 64-bit for that kind of use yet.

large virtual address spaces

[LordMyren]

x86-64's main use is its address space. 32 bits places a 4 million word limitation on your addressing. systems like zfs that are heavily heavily transactional end up addressing a lot more objects than this. once you've breeched your 32bit addressing, the performance of native 64 bit addressing v. some kind of page extension mode is night and day. zfs's _need_ for x86-64 stems from this; it'll run on an "old" athlon, but in 64bit mode it flies.

my personal belief is that the future, the nebulous area Stroustroupe outlines as "better concurrency," is really going to be implemented at a platform level as this kind of deeply nested transactional data structuring, where instead of overwriting your object to change its state, you simply append the new state in a new part of memory. thus each object accumulates address space (referentiability) as it changes across time. i'll leave the full details implementation & ramifications of Copy on Update up to the user for now.

otoh, a lot of science people want double floats and 64 bit words, but look at the big boys, nvidia. it may bite them in the @#$@# someday, but for now they're sticking to a strong party line: 32bit floating point is sufficient. this works alright for video cards & games, since 4 channels of 32bit fp is an 128bit fp buffer. thats large, but still not entirely that accurate. i'd like to see a time when even game worlds are so massive they straight up require 64bit fp. i'd like to see nvidia release consumer cards with 64bit float performance sometime soon, but i dont think the odds of that happening are very big: its new technology with only a couple scientifc users making any use of it. just as it took the boys at Epic, Sweeny & CliffyB both stating the xbox needed more video ram, without vocal powreful demand we probably wont see it for a while.

hopefully we'll be doing more distributed dispatching with gpus in the future. 64 bit ints are going to be required there.

lordmyren
by 2012 -- the end of time

Re:large virtual address spaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Did trying to pronounce "Stroustrup" traumatize you so much that you're no longer able to spell it either?

Re:large virtual address spaces

[Peter La Casse]

it may bite them in the @#$@# someday

This is the Internet. You're allowed to say "ass".

Re:large virtual address spaces

[jlarocco]

x86-64's main use is its address space. 32 bits places a 4 million word limitation on your addressing.

That's not entirely true. The new 64 bit extensions also added 8 new registers. That doesn't necessarily speed up most apps, but they do allow for more function parameters to be passed in registers. Theoretically it could reduce the number of memory accesses required, too.

otoh, a lot of science people want double floats and 64 bit words, but look at the big boys, nvidia. it may bite them in the @#$@# someday, but for now they're sticking to a strong party line: 32bit floating point is sufficient. this works alright for video cards & games, since 4 channels of 32bit fp is an 128bit fp buffer. thats large, but still not entirely that accurate. i'd like to see a time when even game worlds are so massive they straight up require 64bit fp.

Graphics cards usually stay with 32-bit floats because they're "good enough." For 32-bit RGBA color, four 32-bit floats get shoved into 32-bits for display, so a whole 32-bits per component is already overkill. Position data is a little different, but adding more bits still wouldn't make much of a difference.

Scientific programs already use 64-bit and higher floating point. GCC, for example, offers the "-m128bit-long-double" compiler switch to use 128-bits for the "long double" type. For x86_64 GCC uses 128-bit long doubles by default.

Re:large virtual address spaces

[LordMyren]

the positional data is key. there's enough sig figs with a 64bit float that even if you are truncating a lot of the absolute positional data there's still enough sig figs remaining to keep accuracy.

furthermore, to say that 32bit fp per component rendered down to 32 bit color (24 bit actually, my monitor doesnt do alpha) is excessive is an egrigious lie. the 128bit wide drawing buffer contains far more information than the screen can display, yes, but the graphics card generates some kind of mapping that makes the best use out of that high precision information. 32bit integer color granularity is massively degrading: if you're in extreme darkness, visually discerning the difference between #000200020003 and #000300030004 is really hard. to make the difference noticable, the system might attempt to scale the color differences, quadruple the luminocity. in 32bit integer, we get #00080008000c and #000c000c0010, but nothing in between. with a floating point component system, there can be inherently a lot more information to work with. the screen can have a large number of shades of gray someplace between #000200020003 and #000300030004, and this extra precision can be translated with HDR mappings into better scaling. 32bit fp per component is the bee's knees; a huge part of modern video gaming technology is possible because of the enhanced precision.

on a stack based system, no application would ever require new registers. the new registers are simply a performance boost. then again, going from a pentium III to a 32bit mode opteron will also give you a performance/IPC boost. i'm trying to say its just a marginal factor, a performance feature just like any other hardware performance feature and not really worthy of being considered a new capability or functionality. i'm sure its well warrented in some places; i'd like to see some best case performance gains for some computationally intensive tight loops to give an idea of what kind or improvements are possible, but its simply not a significant difference.

otoh, limited addressability is hard fixed limitation with consequences beyond merely performance.

Re:large virtual address spaces

[Score Whore]

32bit integer color granularity is massively degrading: if you're in extreme darkness, visually discerning the difference between #000200020003 and #000300030004 is really hard. to make the difference noticable, the system might attempt to scale the color differences, quadruple the luminocity. in 32bit integer, we get #00080008000c and #000c000c0010, but nothing in between.

So what you're saying here is that either your eyeball or your monitor can't discern the difference between x and x+1, so in fact 24 bits of displayed color information is excessive to your needs.

Re:large virtual address spaces

[LordMyren]

I'm saying that if you have a lot more information to start with, you can create a much better projection of that information into screen data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_im aging

Re:large virtual address spaces

[TTK Ciar]

x86-64's main use is its address space. 32 bits places a 4 million word limitation on your addressing.

This is exactly my experience, too. Whatever small advantage there is to eight more GPR's is not visible to me, but I greatly appreciate the ability to run large processes. I commonly need to process largish datasets which all go into a monster hash table, and then process other datasets which annotate the hashed records incrementally. Perl is great for this, but sometimes perl's per-record memory overhead proved too expensive. I'd often have to recode something in C or split the hash across multiple processes (or machines) when I either ran out of logical address space or simply ran out of physical memory and thrashed the swap too hard to make good progress. A script that took fifteen or thirty minutes to write in Perl could easily take a day or a week to write in C. Writing just part of the script in C, and stitching it to the perl parts of the software through PVM works, and is less effort than rewriting all of it in C, but is still more work than just rattling off a couple hundred lines of perl and being done with it.

Since I got access to some Athlon64 X2 3800+'s, though, that's all put behind me. I have SLAMD64 (a straightforward port of Slackware Linux to AMD64) on them, and maxed out the motherboards with memory, and now I'm writing less C than ever before. So far all of the software I need "just works", either out of the box or after compiling it myself. For what I had to compile, "./configure ; make ; make install" (or "perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make install") has done it for everything (except for a few perl modules which needed extra cajoling). SLAMD64-10.2b has been wonderful, exhibiting the same rock-solid stability as the "real" Slackware. Apache, MySQL, qmail, Perl, Python, PVM, GPG, CVS, rsync, ProFTPD, OpenSSH, and BIND (and probably others, but those are the ones I've used) behave exactly the same as before, they just have a larger logical memory space to play in.

I have not yet personally experienced 64-bit Linux as a desktop environment, but some of my co-workers have. They seem happy enough with it. Three of them like whatever that 64-bit Ubuntu distrib is called, and one likes SuSE but he's a weirdo ;-) well, I'm the token Slackware weirdo, so can hardly be casting stones..

-- TTK

Re: large virtual address spaces

[Dolda2000]

my personal belief is that the future, the nebulous area Stroustroupe outlines as "better concurrency," is really going to be implemented at a platform level as this kind of deeply nested transactional data structuring, where instead of overwriting your object to change its state, you simply append the new state in a new part of memory. thus each object accumulates address space (referentiability) as it changes across time. i'll leave the full details implementation & ramifications of Copy on Update up to the user for now.

Yeah! After all, just modifying a single word and allocating a new structure, changing it, and updating all pointers to it are probably just 2 or 3 orders of magnitude apart in performance. Now that we have these fast CPUs, we have to put all those cycles to use somewhere, don't we?

ZFS gets away with it since it's a filesystem driver, and secondary memory is still many more orders of magnitude apart and has a much lesser frequency of access, but to do it with all data structures in memory seems like taking us back to the time of ~1e6 Hz CPUs. I'd say semaphores will be the way to go until the day this can somehow be implemented in hardware. It does have its place here and there (and is used to some extent in the Linux kernel, under the name of RCU (Read, Copy, Update)), but going as far as using it on all shared structures is another thing entirely. Seems like a disaster for caching as well.

Debian AMD64 is Awesome

[jlarocco]

I built an Athlon64 machine a while back and put Debian Etch on it, and it's awesome.

You have to use the testing or unstable branches to get AMD64 support until the 4.0 release, but testing (Etch) has been working perfectly for me. With very little work, I've even been able to get the few 32-bit apps I need to work. Without a chroot I have Opera (with Flash), the 32-bit proprietary video codecs, and a few others working perfectly.

The only "gotcha" I can think of is that the nVidia kernel module isn't in the apt-get package repositories. So after every kernel update I have to apt-get the newer linux sources and reinstall the drivers. But that's not a 64-bit vs 32-bit issue.

Re:Debian AMD64 is Awesome

[alphamugwump]

You have flash without a chroot? How?

My initial problem with Etch was the difficulty of finding packages for all the evil, patent-infringing programs like mplayer. But after I found debian-unofficial and debian-multimedia, it was a very sweet system, better than Ubuntu.

And I've come to the conclusion that getting the drivers from the source is the best way to go. Even with Ubuntu, if you want Beryl working, you need the nvidia drivers.

Re:Debian AMD64 is Awesome

[jgrahn]

I built an Athlon64 machine a while back and put Debian Etch on it, and it's awesome. You have to use the testing or unstable branches to get AMD64 support until the 4.0 release, but testing (Etch) has been working perfectly for me.

Debian Sarge for x86_64 is perfectly well supported; you don't have to run testing/unstable.

With very little work, I've even been able to get the few 32-bit apps I need to work. Without a chroot I have Opera (with Flash), the 32-bit proprietary video codecs, and a few others working perfectly.

Without a chroot? How? Opera is my only problem -- I don't want to bother with chroot environments, so I'm stuck with the statically linked 32-bit version. The Opera people don't make it a priority to release a 64-bit version, unfortunately.

Re:Debian AMD64 is Awesome

[massysett]

Without a chroot? How? Opera is my only problem -- I don't want to bother with chroot environments, so I'm stuck with the statically linked 32-bit version. The Opera people don't make it a priority to release a 64-bit version, unfortunately.

On Gentoo at least, there are several libraries that emulate a x86 environment on amd64. Portage installs these as needed. Also, when glibc compiles, you get both amd64 and x86 versions of many (if not all) libraries. This is how 32-bit Firefox works in Gentoo, without a chroot (though the Firefox is precompiled, unlike almost all other Gentoo software.)

Re:Debian AMD64 is Awesome

[mennucc1]

I built an Athlon64 machine a while back and put Debian Etch on it, and it's awesome.

agree. It also comes handy when you have to debug code that cannot be compiled in i386 without high optimization , as in

Without a chroot I have Opera (with Flash),

let me part of the chorus asking how you get to run flash

the 32-bit proprietary video codecs

in what program?

Re:Debian AMD64 is Awesome

[jlarocco]

You have flash without a chroot? How?

I set it up quite a while back, so I don't remember exactly. It was something like this. Hope that helps.

Good for the Linux server...

[FooAtWFU]

64-bit is good for the Linux server market ... not looking so good for the desktop. You can get an Opteron-powered box for a decent price, all the big distros will support it, and you can usually run some sort of "32-bit compatibility layer" in case you've got some precompiled stuff you need to have work. A few years ago, I was having some problems getting certain programs to work with 64-bit support (Swish-E, specifically) but everything seems to be better now. So you can go ahead and add the 8 gigabytes of RAM to your database server with nothing to fear.

Exchange 2007 requires 64-bit

[addikt10]

Exchange 2007 requires 64-bit processors (Itanium need not apply). Additionally, resellers such as Dell have discontinued sales of Exchange 2003. Looks like Microsoft wants to move to 64-bit, and that is going to be enough for the server world to move entirely to 64-bit, and certainly enough to recommend 64-bit systems to my clients. Exchange 2007 System Requirements

Yes, go for 64-bit processors

[MoxFulder]

First of all, I prefer AMD processors myself, though I prefer to believe that I am not an unthinking fanboy. AMD does not make any non-64-bit processors anymore, so that makes the choice easy :-)

64-bit support under Linux is YEARS ahead of where it is under Windows! With Ubuntu Linux, 64-bit support "just works." I downloaded the x86_64 Install CD and burnt it, and everything installed flawlessly. Basically every single open source package compiles correctly in 64-bit mode, from the kernel to all the drivers to my favorite games. The *only* things that don't work are closed-source packages (yech!). For example, Flash and the Windows Media codecs still aren't available compiled natively for x86_64... which is entirely the fault of those particular software companies. If you need to install a few 32-bit closed-source apps under 64-bit Linux, you can do it but it takes a little know-how.

Under Windows, I'm told that there are vanishingly few native 64-bit apps and drivers. I haven't tried 64-bit Windows myself, but I gather that support isn't there yet. Proprietary software vendors don't want to release 64-bit versions because it means supporting multiple versions and possibly conflicting configurations.

Moving up to 64-bit makes obvious sense if you need to use >4gb of memory or do lots of number-crunching. But it has advantages for "ordinary" Desktop use as well... for one thing, the x86_64 instruction set adds more general-purpose registers, which allows more efficient compilation of code. Based on the expert information I've read, I believe this alone should result in a 10-20% speedup between 32-bit and 64-bit code.

So if you're using Linux, 64-bit is a no-brainer. With Windows, you probably won't see any benefit immediately, but once 64-bit apps and drivers become widely available, you'll appreciate the additional performance.

Re:Yes, go for 64-bit processors

[lavid]

I haven't had the same wonderful experience with 64bits and Ubuntu. I'm acutally about to download Feisty 32bit since the 64 bit still lacks Wine.

Re:Yes, go for 64-bit processors

[chriso11]

I thought that WINE wasn't stable/usable on a 64bit system. Am I wrong?

Re:Yes, go for 64-bit processors

[lavid]

Gentoo has it and it certainly will compile on my system. The real issue which I didn't have time to type out is that a lot of software can be made available for a 64bit system by either running a compatibility layer or simply running the 32 bit version. I cannot, for example, on Ubuntu 64bit adjust the brightness for my LCD because the sonypi module "just doesn't show up" when I search for it using Synaptec. That shouldn't be the case.

Re:Yes, go for 64-bit processors

[MoxFulder]

Interesting... I don't use Wine so haven't run into this issue. I suspect the Wine problems may stem partly from the fact that Wine is trying to emulate Windows, which as I mentioned, has lots of problems with 64-bit.

Any other apps you've had trouble with under 64-bit Ubuntu??

X86-64 Windows

[Ramble]

It's an interesting question. When I was running Gentoo I firstly compiled it for amd64, and there was quitea performance boost - not noticible, but it felt more responsive. Going to 32-bit Gentoo wasn't really worth it.

I'm running on Vista RC2 x86 right now (and loving it) and will be doing a Christmas upgrade to RTM x64.

While I will get less driver support, it's not much of an issue because I should get increased speed, reliability and security out of it which far outweighs some crappy scanner not working with my system.

Just went 64-bit a few months ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran the 64-bit Windows XP trial for a couple of weeks, but went back to 32-bit XP. Really haven't noticed the difference in speed but have noticed the difference in software support -- there's no decent free firewall with 64-bit support and Intel Desktop Utilities refused to install properly.

I am also currently running Fedora 6 with 64-bit support, and that runs stably but again I didn't notice anything magic about being in 64-bit mode besides having certain things not work (I have to keep a 32-bit compile of Firefox around to run 32-bit-only plugins like Flash for example.)

If you're building Vista systems, go with 64-bit -- it's likely that serious 64-bit desktop applications will be released on that platform over the next few years. Otherwise, I don't know that I'd bother... XP 64 is kind of an odd duck, like Windows 95 OSR2.

Desktop? Beware....

[carney1979]

I am currently trying 64-bit Vista and it's the best 64-bit distro I've tried to date.

I feel I must add it's only the 2nd 64-bit distro I've tried. In my opinion, 64-bit Ubuntu or any other 64-bit Linux flavors are not yet ready for full desktop use. You have to manually configure too much to run in 32-bit emulation mode, if it will run at all.

64-bit Vista does all this pretty seamlessly so far. But if you run the full-blown Vista with all the bells and whistles, you will need more horsepower than my machine has. It's a AMD 64-bit 3500+ processor and it has 1 gig memory. Vista usually runs alright, but it can bog down some at times.

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd ever recommend Windows over Linux but in my opinion, as far as the 64-bit desktop enviroment goes, Linux has missed a great opportunity to take the lead.

David

I switched over 2 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

No problems here on gentoo but I don't run silly things like flash that require 32bit builds.

I am going to 65

[Timesprout]

cos I always want to have that extra bit from my machines.

Re:I am going to 65

[Anonymous Coward]

64, 65, whatever it takes.

Re:I am going to 65

[CaptainCheese]

Timesprout: "You see, most blokes will be coding with sixty-four bit registers. You're on sixty-four, all the way up, all the way up...Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff...sixty-five. One bigger."

DiBergi: "Why don't you just write a integer maths library that can virtualize any size you define, and make that a little bigger?"

Timesprout: (baffled) "This goes up to sixty-five."

Re:I am going to 65

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll stick with 55. It's safer and uses less energy.

Definitely!

[Chemisor]

Slackware Slamd64 has had support for AMD64 for a while now and it works just fine, no driver problems or stability problems on the Linux side. On the Windows XP64 side things aren't as rosy, but not as bad as some people say either. I found drivers for all my hardware, including the graphics card (NV7600), and so the OS is functioning very well. Some games don't run, but all the ones I play do. Half Life 2 (64bit version), HL2E1, Sims 2, Flight Simulator 9 and X, all Civilization versions and CTP, Fallout 1 (F2 doesn't work), GTA 3 and SA, all work great.

If you are a programmer, you will definitely want to get on x86_64. You get twice (!) as many general purpose registers, twice as many SSE registers, and a much cleaner ABI with most things passed in registers instead of the stack. You also will no longer be using the 387 FPU, as the ABI supports doing pretty much everything through SSE, unlike the 32bit ABI that required returning floats in an FPU register. This should greatly reduce your EMMS headaches. Finally having native 64-bit types rocks! The premature optimization nut in you will crack with joy, I guarantee it.

How to decide between XP and XP-64

[Sloppy]

..but I'm wondering if it worth it to run a box on XP-64?

If you're even considering Windows, then that suggests you have some kind of heavy legacy requirements. Those legacy applications are what matters; check to see if they have been re-compiled. That's how you'll decide which way to go. If your legacy is ready for 64 bits, then maybe you are too. If your legacy isn't ready, then what's the point?

Purchasing cycle

[GaryOlson]

This depends on your purchasing cycles. I recommend different PCs depending on the the projected life of the system. Two or three year purchasing cycle -- no x64; four years or longer with expansion room for RAM and mirrored HDDs -- yes.

Can;t justify the cost.

[FatSean]

Nothing I use my machines for would realy benefit from 64-bit processing. I don't use that much memory, and the heaviest CPU load comes from Nero trans-coding AVI files and CIV4.

I'll probably move up to 64, when you guys start talking about 128!

Re:Can;t justify the cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

But encoding video DOES benefit from 64-bit processors.

The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[mrchaotica]

All the new processors from AMD and Intel (and IBM, for that matter) are 64-bit. Therefore, if you get a new PC, you have no choice but to get a 64-bit processor in it. And since they're all backwards-compatible to 32-bit, there's no downside.

The only relevant issue here is whether you want to run 64-bit or 32-bit software on it.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[gutnor]

Unfortunatly there is still a lot of Intel Core Duo and Core Solo on the laptop market. And especially the Core Duo is still a solid offering even in higher-range laptop.

Some brand updated the Core Duo to Core 2 Duo for 'free', but for most, it is still a premium that is not worth it (10% more perf 30% more $). Especially right now before the release of Vista, when you have the choice between a beter graphic card or a marginally beter CPU.

But as you said, probably second quarter next year, that would be a non issue.
Until then, for a laptop, if you plan to change again in the next 2 years, I would go for a good deal for the Core Duo.
Unless you plan to run Linux, if it's more than 2 years with Microsoft pushing all it can to make Vista64 the main Vista release, I would pay the extra for 64bit or delay my purchase until you don't have the choice.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[MojoStan]

Also, Intel's current entry-level notebook CPU, the Yonah-based Celeron M, is still 32-bit and won't be upgraded to the 64-bit Merom core until Q1 2007. This is the CPU you'll likely find in many sub-$600 notebooks and has more than enough performance for most users, IMO. I thought Apple should have used it in a sub-$500 Mac mini (it can use the mini's chipset).

So for this significant portion of the notebook market, I think the transition to 64-bit will probably stretch out past Q2 2007. It might go quicker than most, however, because Merom uses the same chipset as Yonah.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[mrchaotica]

Yeah, I know -- I just ordered a Core Duo Thinkpad X60 tablet a few days ago, and unfortunately didn't even have an option to get a Core 2. If I'm lucky, maybe it's socketed and upgradable, but either way having a tablet screen was more important to me than having a 64-bit CPU, even if I run an OS on it that supports 64-bit well.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[BenoitRen]

Which is why you search out a nice AMD Athlon XP processor that is 32-bits and use that one. :)

My new PC will have it when I assemble it. Already got the CPU secured. No need for 32 extra bits that aren't going to be used.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[mrchaotica]

Uh, I hate to break it to you, but the newer chips have other virtues than just being 64-bit: they're also considerably faster (and possibly dual-core). Why are you going out of your way to get a slower chip?

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[BenoitRen]

Subject is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+. That's equivalent to a Pentium IV over 2 Ghz. For someone not into sound/video editing, it's more than enough.

Really, the only reason I need a newer PC is to play Phantasy Star Universe and compiling SeaMonkey (and when I get Linux, other things). My laptop is an AMD Sempron 3000+, and it compiles SeaMonkey in 50 minutes. Good enough.

If it weren't for those, my older Pentium II 233 Mhz PC with Win95 OSR 2.5 I'm still using would suit all my needs.

Dual core, just like 64-bit, is mostly a fad. Dual processor setups don't exist for speed, but to keep a system up. Dual cores came into existence because of a recent lack in innovation for single core processors, just like 3dfx' Voodoo series back in the day.

Furthermore, dual core is being advertised as being double as fast as single core processors, which is not true. At the most, you get a 50% increase.

Again, unless you're into advanced stuff like heavy sound/video editing, you don't need these super CPUs.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[mrchaotica]

Dual core, just like 64-bit, is mostly a fad. Dual processor setups don't exist for speed, but to keep a system up. Dual cores came into existence because of a recent lack in innovation for single core processors, just like 3dfx' Voodoo series back in the day.

The difference is that the situation seems likely to persist this time.

Furthermore, dual core is being advertised as being double as fast as single core processors, which is not true. At the most, you get a 50% increase.

No, at most you'll get a 100% increase (assuming you're doing two different CPU-intensive tasks that don't need to pass data back and forth at all). 50% is closer to an average figure (unless you spend all your time doing only a single CPU-intensive task, that can't be multithreaded).

Again, unless you're into advanced stuff like heavy sound/video editing, you don't need these super CPUs.

Or gaming (soon, when more games become multithreaded), or running Folding@home, or compiling Seamonkey in less than 50 minutes...

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[WuphonsReach]

This is one of those areas where I feel that AMD was about 2 (3?) years ahead of Intel.

They came out with a 64bit CPU that, unlike Itanium, performed just as fast on 32bit tasks as the predecessor. Which meant that buying AMD 64bit chips was a no-risk decision. You could get a 64bit chip (future-proof) but without sacrificing performance on existing 32bit workloads. I don't know if it was an engineering or marketing decision, but it was an important one.

Imagine a world where Intel's Core 2 was the first 64bit chip for x86. It would've pushed the move to 64bit back to 2010 instead of possibly happening as soon as 2007.

(Not sure when the 64bit Xeon CPUs first hit the market. We've been buying all Opteron systems.)

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[default luser]

Furthermore, dual core is being advertised as being double as fast as single core processors, which is not true. At the most, you get a 50% increase.

We didn't go multi-core because "it's a fad." We've gone dual and quad core because (relatively) we've hit the wall on processing speed. We've gone with multiple simple cores because Instruction-Level Parallelism (the governor of out-of-order-execution) shows dimishing returns as you throw more hardware at it.

Do you think Intel made the Core 2 "just" 4-decode, 4-retire on a whim? It's a balance between hardaware requirements and performance: you get decreasing returns as you add more pipes, and each additional pipe requires more hardware than the last.

Yes, the increase in performance with more cores is not that impressive for most applications. However, that will HAVE to change, because ILP processing gains won't increase much over the Core 2 design unless we see a paradigm shift in chip design techniques. We have simply moved the problem from hardware to software.

Think about this: multi-threaded software is hard, but at least it's cheaper than a super-complex chip. One other key point: even the most complex software costs virtually nothing to make copies of it. The complex chip, on the other hand, costs more to design than the complex software: each complex chip built has a higher defect rate and requres significantly more test time than a pair of simpler cores (which can be tested in-parallel).

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[MojoStan]

This is one of those areas where I feel that AMD was about 2 (3?) years ahead of Intel.

3+ years for the high-end workstation/low-end server market (Xeon/Opteron). But that's not what I was referring to.

I don't want to sound like an Intel fanboi/apologist, but "the area" I was talking about was the budget notebook market and I think Intel has been ahead of AMD in this "area" since the Celeron M started using the first Pentium M core (Banias). Even today (for the vast majority of users in this market), I think 64-bit extensions are far less important than the performance per watt users get from Banias/Dothan/Yonah and the Centrino chipsets. In this market, I don't think users are going to use a 64-bit OS until at least their next computer purchase.

However, in "the area" that I think you were referring to in your comment (high end workstation, low-mid server), I agree that AMD was way ahead of Intel (Itanium is a different area, though). The Opteron was released in April 2003 and the Xeon finally got the Woodcrest core in June 2006. For this area, I think the NetBurst architecture was always behind the Opteron architecture.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[BenoitRen]

OK, but why is this being commercialised all over the place and replacing the older processors? This is stuff that corporations or advanced users who do heavy stuff need, not home users.

That's basically my problem with the computing industry today. Sure, improve your stuff, but don't push it down our throats like we need it. Give us a choice, and leave the high-end stuff for corporations and people that actually need it.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[default luser]

But you CAN buy inexpensive single-core processors. AMD still sells single-core Semprons and Athlon 64s for AM2, and they're damn cheap thanks to recent battles in the high-end dual-core market.

As for 64-bit, what's wrong with "overcomercializing" it? The whole purpose of flooding the market with 64-bit processors is two-fold:

1. The processor makers are forced to keep up with each other. Buzzwords like 64-bit are powerful, and eventually you have to make all your processors match your competiitor's specs, or come out with your own version. The same thing happened with big buzzwords like MMX and the battle between SSE and 3DNOW!.

2. Microsoft and the open-source world are lobbying the processor makers heavily to go full 64-bit because it is MUCH EASIER to drop support for 32-bit modes when all the processors sold on the market have 64-bit support. You might as well buy one now so the driver makers have an excuse to pour extra cash into making better drivers...by the time the (64-bit only) successor to Vista comes out, you'll have a nice stable platform.

I'm curious myself what builds of Vista hardware manufacturers will ship. Will they bite the bullet and go 64-bit, or will they ride it out until they run into the 4GB wall? There's only one thing I know for certain: hardware manufacturers WILL have to ship Vista 64 systems - their performance systems will hit the 4GB wall within the year, and even their low-end systems will be pushing 2GB within the next 5 years.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[BenoitRen]

Or gaming

Gaming belongs on game consoles. They were designed for them. PCs were not. I had the impression that the requirements for PC games had stagnated for a couple years now anyway, save for needing better video cards.

or running Folding@home

Do people seriously buy a PC for that?

or compiling Seamonkey in less than 50 minutes...

There's always the 3+ Ghz behemoths for that. :) The Sempron is a budget CPU anyway. I think the Athlon XP will perform better. The Mozilla building process is fairly I/O intensive, so a better hard disk will help too.

Re:The answer is: because you don't have a choice.

[BenoitRen]

As for 64-bit, what's wrong with "overcomercializing" it?

It's not necessary for home users. Keep it in the corporations, for big databases where they actually need loads of memory.

The processor makers are forced to keep up with each other. Buzzwords like 64-bit are powerful, and eventually you have to make all your processors match your competiitor's specs, or come out with your own version.

Sadly, yes.

Microsoft and the open-source world are lobbying the processor makers heavily to go full 64-bit because it is MUCH EASIER to drop support for 32-bit modes when all the processors sold on the market have 64-bit support.

Perhaps, but that'd only make sense if 64-bit was needed for the home user. Not everyone is a hardcore geek or a monopolist trying to keep up the perpetual upgrade cycle by bloating their OS.

Re:On the desktop, yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Render nodes, database and HPC servers should be 64bit machines but most servers or network appliances do not benefit. Contrast with the desktop where I envision having multiple images open in an editor running on a virtualised OS, transcoding a media stream and copy pasting between my browser and remote terminal.

I suppose you think 640k would be enough for a desktop computer?

But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[MarcQuadra]

I just bought a Core 2 Duo board and processor. I immediately installed the native 64-bit Gentoo on it, but after two months, I decided to go back to running the x86 distribution. I've been using Linux since 1998, and Gentoo on x86 and PowerPC since before 1.4, and I wasn't very happy with amd64.

I'm a desktop user with 2GB RAM, the server is a PowerPC with 1.5GB RAM. I've never seen a system munch memory like this box when it was running 64-bit Linux. Running all those compatability libraries (for Firefox, OpenOffice, and several other apps) seemed to eat a ton of RAM.

Until every app and plugin I use is 64-bit native, I think I'll stay with 32-bit operating systems.

As for 64-bit hardware, you really don't have much choice if you want to buy new hardware. There's no reason NOT to buy 64-bit processors these days, you get the best bang for your buck with AMD64 or EMT64 CPUs. 32-bit operating systems benefit from the new processors almost as much as 64-bit systems do, so go ahead and 'go 32 on 64' if you want a modern computer.

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[mqduck]

I just bought a Core 2 Duo board and processor. I immediately installed the native 64-bit Gentoo on it, but after two months, I decided to go back to running the x86 distribution./blockquote"

Why is that? I'm currently in the process of installing amd64 Gentoo, so I'd like to know.

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because Gentoo QA sucks these days, except for niche architectures like SPARC and MIPS. They've let a bunch of idiots regularly break the portage tree, so the 30 good developers end up cleaning up the messes created by the 300 mediocre ones. Portage is missing simple features that should have been implemented three years ago. It's a distro in desperate need of a forking.

-- a disgruntled ex-Gentoo dev

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[AMystery]

I assume it was just a typo, but you did say you bought an Intel core 2 duo and then ran AMD64 on it. That could be the source of the problems...

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[MarcQuadra]

I'm switching back to 32-bit because:

1. I'm a purist, and having my top two apps (firefox and openoffice) run in compat. mode seems stupid to me.
2. 64-bit native was only about 3% faster. Really.
3. 64-bit Linux seemed to chew up a lot more RAM, cutting into my precious disk cache, making some operations slower than they are now in 32-bit mode.
4. 32-bit Linux is more stable. Things 'just work' that wouldn't when I was running native.
5. I can keep one config and one build of the system for all my older boxes that don't have 64-bit hardware.

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[MarcQuadra]

The native AMD64/EMT64 Linux distro for AMD and Intel chips is labeled 'amd64' in the Gentoo world. Once you're past the Gentoo stuff, the developers tend to call it all x86_64.

If you want to run native 64-bit linux on modern Intel chips, you use the 'amd64' distribution. Intel 'stole' AMD's implementation after they realized that IA64 wasn't going anywhere near your desktop.

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[MrNemesis]

Ditto for my experience. On getting a shiny new desktop system with an almost-top-of-the-line A64 3500, I was excited as hell to try out 64bit Linux.

Indeed, once it was all up and running, I did notice some great speed benefits - OpenSSL simply flies, and many CPU-heavy multimedia apps such as LAME and mplayer showed slight improvments.

But the userland was another story. Since so much near-essential stuff* is still 32bit (thanks, mainly to sloppy coding [hello OOo...!] and closed source stuff [Flash]) you pretty much have to keep an almost entire 32b userland running at the same time as your 64bit DE. I guess I was kinda lucky in that Opera is my fave browser, and it being 32bit only I had no problems with 32bit flash, and it was still fairly quick to load. Starting a 32bit FF when you're running a 64bit KDE installation required me to load all of the 32b GTK libs before firefox could begin to think about executing. Combine that with the (slightly) inflated binary sizes of 64b executables and the higher memory requirements of running applications in a 64b envionment and you end up with a machine that is slower overall.

So, to cut a long story short, marginal improvements in some apps were countered by horrendous usability problems on the desktop.

If you're running a server (or any other machine that doesn't require 32bt niceties), 64bit Linux just rocks.

DISCLAIMER: I relaise that issues with 64b Linux on the desktop aren't Linux's fault, just like XP64's problems with drivers aren't MS's fault either. They're just issues that most would like to avoid

* Yes, I'm aware that Flash can be ignored by many people, but it's a deal breaker for the WAF. Similarly OpenOffice, whilst techically replaceable with things like Koffice that don't hog so many resources, is still the de-facto standard that all other office apps have to measure up to.

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[The_Dougster]

I have 64bit Firefox and OpenOffice working now in Gentoo amd64, I don't have any compatibility libs installed, and I'm running stable versions of 98% of the apps. Its a really nice system.

On the windows side, I have XP-X64 running which is also very good. I haven't had any problems with anything I tried to run, even 32bit games. I'm definitely not planning on going to Vista64 though unless I absolutely have to.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with my Athlon64 X2 3800+, it is considerably faster than the old Athlon XP 2400+ overall, and sometimes very much faster. The dual cores just fly when compiling Gentoo which is really nice. Python seems to run really fast also, possibly due to the extra registers.

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[MarcQuadra]

So your Flash player works fine? How about mplayerplug-in?

What happens when you browse to a site with a movie embedded in it, like http://www.apple.com/getamac ?

I'm back to running a 32-bit kernel and userland on my 64-bit CPU and a lot of things like those that were broken work again.

No matter what you did, running -anything-, be it 16, 32, or 64-bit would be much faster on your X2 3800+ than it would on your single-core 2400+.

In my case, running 64-bit with compat. libs for 32-bit apps was actually slowing my system down for most things because there was a lot less RAM available for disk caching.

The only thing that's slower than before is encoding video, and it's only a few percent worse, a small tradeoff for being able to use YouTube without adding 140MB to my resident set.

Some day, running 64-bit native will be the right thing to do for me, but I don't expect it for at least a few months.

Re:But 64-bit is overkill for a lot of us

[The_Dougster]

Oh yeah, the flash player. No you're right it doesn't work in 64bit. Can't say I miss it though. All it does is enable annoying ads on webpages. I usually regret installing it everytime I do. I think that the mplayer plugin is working though. Java is working but somewhat crashy.

Amd64 is an experimental system, so not everything is as fully supported as in regular x86. I can live with it. I have been considering rebuilding a small 32bit x86 system too to play older commercial Linux games, but its pretty low priority. I really haven't tried the 32bit emulation libs so I can't say one way or another but I'd assume some kind of performance hit would be involved.

Yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course we're switching to 64-bit CPU's. All new CPU's will be 64-but but able to run 32-bit too.

For the software, no I won't go 64-bit, because it doesn't do anything good for me, so why should I?

As far as I understand, 64-bit is useless for most software. Some software do slightly better on 64-bit though.

So most of the system will be 32-bit, but maybe one or two apps will be 64-bit.

Largely a mirage

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the most interesting stuff going on today is 32-bit floating point (graphics card innards). The greater benefit is from increased registers, not some vague notion of 64-bit-ed-ness. With IPv6, we'll probably have 128-bit computers. At some point, everything will just be 1-bit variable or something cool like that. a'o sai loi skami cu ba vlipa

Realizing that I'm the exception

[benhocking]

I'm really happy that most processors are now 64 bit. 64 bit means it's easier to access more RAM. More RAM means I can simulate more neurons and synapses in less time.

x86-64 is a piece of cake

[(H)elix1]

Win64 is a piece of cake, for the most part. I picked up an NForce4 AMD64 board about a year and a half ago - they had drivers for all of the on board kit (Ethernet, usb, sound, firewire) and NVidia had drivers for the video cards I had as well. As a server or workstation (lines get fuzzy on a dev box), I had very little problems with finding drivers for even the SCSI kit I added into the mix. I also had 4x1G RAM, which Win64 picked up. I ended up going with Win2003-64 and Win2003-32 (with limited access to all 4G, closer to 3.5G with switches, etc) for the Windows environments as it had better support than WinXP-64. 3rd party hardware stuff may be iffy... scanner/printers seem to get forgotten.

64-bit Gentoo and SuSE both worked like a charm too - but you asked about Windows. Nice to have multiple HDD chassis. (grin)

The thing that you might have problems with were programs. I found that the 'default' install path for the 32-bit stuff would cause some of my programs to trip up. Things like the 32-bit DVD/CD burning software and a few other programs. But anyhow - should you go with a 64-bit CPU? Yes. Win64 is probably more trouble than it is worth for 'generic' gaming rig today. As Vista goes into mainstream, those using a 32-bit processor will be the odd man out.

What doesn't work...

[straponego]

In my experience, both in Windows and Linux, what doesn't work is almost always non-free software. Flash, Java, LOTS of Windows drivers (like cpu monitoring/throttling stuff, etc), and Windows games are examples. There are workarounds for some of these, and some of them will eventually be patched. But it's a good rule of thumb to keep in mind: open source stuff will be updated much faster than commercial.

You can get by pretty well with 64 bit Linux. I see no compelling reason to run 64 bit Windows yet, unless you need lots of memory. Yeah, you could get a small boost from having more registers, and yeah, it's cool; but the Windows world is just not used to porting to other architectures :). The CPUs have been out, what, 3 years? And it is still a royal pain. And if you game... get used to things like Neverwinter Nights 2 going through the entire 6 cd install, only to tell you "Oh, by the way, 64 bit doesn't work. Ha-ha!"

Re:What doesn't work...

[TheThiefMaster]

I have the dvd edition of NWN2 and it runs flawlessly on my windows x64 rig (admittedly it's still a 32-bit program, but it still runs flawlessly). The updater even worked first time, unlike a lot of people on the NWN forums who had trouble. My bet is that anyone who had trouble has a small problem with their machine, NWN2 is huge and it only takes a 1-bit error in the whole thing to make the updater give up on you.

if you can

[Truekaiser]

deal without flash and java(or deal with a buggy wrapper). also use a little extra hd space for emulation libs you can live in 64bit land.

Yes! It's faster even on moderately sized problems

[Soong]

I'm not exactly sure what confluence of compiler, instruction set and silicon technology is going on, but on one test I found that compiling a float-intensive compute problem I run the EM64T (x86-64) version was faster. This is on my new MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo with GCC 4.

From TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 2003 Server is an excellent OS for those seeking to use the full power of the God Box as a server. A serious OS for serious users...

Or you could install Linux and have a much better server OS, one demanding and consuming a buttload less resources than anything from Microsoft.

And for those frightened of the idea of not having flashy GUI 'wizards' automagically setting everything up for them (usually incorrectly), the good news is that even an MCSE could understand a 'Linux for Dummies' book.

Or perhaps not.

Wrong Question

[frovingslosh]

You're asking the wrong question. Of course you should buy a 64 bit system if you're building a new system, unless you have a specific need for a 32 bit system and plan on replacing it within the year. Ther real questions are: Do I want dual core chips (and the really slick hardware virtualization that comes with the dual core chips)? Do I want Intel or AMD? (I'm a long time AMD fan but the Intel dual core chips are getting better buzz than the AMD dual core chips, although you may want to price out the whole systems, not just the CPUs, to get a real idea. And, have other have mentoned here, do I want to run a 64 bit OS or a 32 bit OS? Even with a 32 bit OS you can switch to 64 later (at no cost if you use Linux) as long as you started with a 64 bit CPU.

Re:um. 32 bit?

[Dadoo]

Using Gmail and flash can be interesting for a 64-bit Linux distro - Mozilla just crashes.

I'm running SuSE 10.0 on my HP Athlon 64 laptop and, surprisingly, I don't have that problem. I just installed Flash - 9.0 beta, no less - and it just worked.

Flash 9 is a big step up from Flash 7, too. For instance, on version 7, it was rare for the audio to be in sync with the video. That works perfectly in version 9.

Re:um. 32 bit?

[piojo]

Using Gmail and flash can be interesting for a 64-bit Linux distro - Mozilla just crashes.

I'm using gentoo for intel 64 bits (even new pentium-4's are 64 bits now), and Firefox has never crashed on gmail. I installed a 32 bit version alongside my regular version for the occasional flash page I want to see (but I hate flash). Firefox doesn't ever crash because of flash, it just doesn't display it. I suppose it's possible that this is because Gentoo patches its Firefox, but I don't know. If I were more pragmatic, I would simply use the 32 bit version of Firefox for all my browsing needs.

Everything else works nicely. The newest version of OpenOffice supports 64 bit processors natively. I sometimes install software that is marked ~amd64 (not yet fully tested on amd64, usually marked so because less people are using this platform) and they all seem to work fine. In general, if you are considering Linux, the difference between a 64 bit OS and 32 is very small. Go with the 64 if you want the extra geek points.

I'm no expert on Windows, but the 64 bit editions seem to make more decisions about what the user is allowed to do. This might be good in a corporate environment where fixing computers == time and money (?), but I wouldn't like it too much on a personal computer.

Big databases

[Anonymous Coward]

The main improvement for 64-bit systems is being able to use more than 4 GB of ram.

Big databases, big file servers, large numbers of VMware images all benefit from extra ram.

Most desktop apps don't benefit from more than 4 GB of ram.

Will I need function X before replacing new PC?

[davidwr]

Make a list of all the functions you think you'll need before replacing your PC. Then buy a PC that can be expanded to meet those needs.

Sure, you'll guess wrong but it's a good start.

Here's some things I'm thinking of:

Take your initial* system and multiply speed, storage, and if you use them heavily, sound and video by a factor of 2-4 or more. If you buy a 1GB/200GB PC today, plan on it being at least a 2GB/400GB machine when you retire it.

Ask yourself "If I had to upgrade my video, sound, LAN, hard drive controller, and other built-in peripherals with new-and-better versions, how many expansion ports do I need and what kind?"

This usually means a PC with only 3 PCI slots isn't enough.

--
Example:
You are a semi-serious gamer with a modest collection of media files, and you grow your collection by a few 10s of GBs per year. You also do some movie editing but nothing too serious. You decide you need a dual-core 2.5GHz Windows XP Home machine with 1GB RAM/300GB SATA HD, and are willing to spend $150 on video and another $50 on an audio card. You also buy an affordable video-capture card with analog and digital inputs. Your system sports the usual USB 2.0, 100Mbps LAN, and 16x DL DVD drive. You have a "g" wireless router and will pick up a cheap "g" USB stick. Of course you will repartition the drive and install a real OS, using Windows for certain applications as needed.

By the time this machine is retired, plan on 2-4GB RAM, 0.6-1.2TB usable disk space, perhaps another drive or two for SATA RAID mirroring, a new video card or maybe two, same with sound and video-capture cards, MS-Vista and of course new releases of at least one real operating systems, adding a new optical drive, replacing your WLAN infrastructure with "n" or better, maybe 1000Gb Ethernet, better/faster/more USB, and probably at least one add-in card for something you haven't thought of yet.

This means your initial PC should support SATA RAID, at least 1 available IDE device for the 2nd optical drive, at least 4 additional SATA devices should you choose to use 2 HD drives with mirroring/total 4 drives plus an SATA optical disk, plus 6 or 7 expansion slots including 1 high-speed video.

You'll probably have to settle for 5 PCI slots plus a video slot. If you wind up wanting video, audio, video-in, replacement usb, replacement LAN, additional SATA capacity, you won't have a spare. Well, maybe Santa Clause will come early in 2009.

*Some people wait until prices drop to stock up on RAM, hard drives, etc., if you are one of these people, count "initial" after buying these goodies.

Re:Will I need function X before replacing new PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you smoking? PCI, try PCIE. usb wireless stick (that sucks). It keeps going. Functions? Try functionality, try knowing what you are talking about.

64 bit CPUs offer more than just 64 bits...

[MaineCoon]

64 bit is just one of the improvements. CPUs have also gotten faster. It's a package deal, although the two are not necessarily related.

Even if you don't run an OS or software to utilize the 64-bit aspect of the CPU, all the current faster chips are 64-bit. Consider the 64-bit aspect as a bit of future proofing your new, fast machine. Go for SATA-2, PCI-E, and dual core, and you're set for a while.

My Experience

[DLG]

Windows XP-64 bit works fine for me. It seems alot more stable in many ways than the 32 bit xp. It definately starts up faster. I haven't had any driver issues, but I use obscure hardware by companies named NVidia and HP. I would check if you have anything strange.
On occasion I have run into programs that acted up because I was in 64, but there are usually alternatives.

In Linux I have had 0 problems using Ubuntu. The packages are all built for my AMD64. There are occasional issues in terms of things like Flash where you need to run a 32 bit browser for that. Since browsing doesn't much care on the 64 bit front, I don't sweat it. Where it probably makes a real difference is if you are doing work with SQL or graphics where 64 bit integers are more common.

Switching? Now? I switched years ago.

[tonsofpcs]

The kernel and packages have had 64-bit support for years. I have run Linux, WinNT, and BSD on a DEC-Alpha processor, no trouble.

No, I have no supercomputing requirements.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not need more than 4GB of memory (nor will I in the forseeable future).

If you are not running a supercomputing application (e.g. meteorological models etc.) then you do not need a 64 bit processor.

It is amazing how many people have been sucked into thinking they need more than 4GB of memory to run an average web server or play FPS games.

Don't get sucked in.

If you are buying an HP Superdome (or similar) for a huge server application or calculations for physics research or demanding rapid data aquisition such as new MRI applications, then yes, get 64 bit processors, otherwise it is simply a waste.

Re:No, I have no supercomputing requirements.

[Datamonstar]

I'm a composer (amateur/beginner) and I have 2GB of memory and it's not enough. I plan on, going to 4 or possibly more so i can load orchestral samples. Once i get my full MIDI setup I should be able to span my orchestra over several PC's.

Go for it - 64-bit is the only way

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried XP64, Vista x64, Ubuntu 64-bit, SUSE 10.2 64-bit, all worked perfectly.
There is no reason to stick with 32-bit that I can see.
There was no reason to stick with 16-bit once 32-bit became the norm, it just takes a while for the transition period to settle. But there will be no more 32-bit OSs released. All will be 64-bit from now on.

XP=No Vista=Maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no reason to install Windows XP 64 unless the customer definitely runs specific software and needs the additional memory. If a machine does not even have more 2 Gigabytes (the process limit) there is no reason at all to use it. Microsoft has already pretty much dropped XP-64 like a dog.

Vista will get all the real 64 bit attention from Microsoft so if a customer is going to get Vista, it's possibly better to go 64 bit just to be ready. But it's murky.

Windows user

[Savage-Rabbit]

Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.

I spoke to the /. community's resident Windows user and he is refusing to come out his closet unless you will personally guarantee that the hoard of torch and pitchfork wielding penguins outside won't tar and fether him.

Re:Windows user

[hogfat]

Why would a penguin wield a pitchfork?

Re:Windows user

[Anonymous Coward]

...unless you will personally guarantee that the hoard of torch and pitchfork wielding penguins outside won't tar and fether him.

You just don't understand how open source works, do you? If for some reason the Slashdot penguin horde promises to stop tarring and feathering Windows users, I'll just fork the project and start my own horde!

Re:Windows user

[artifex2004]

I spoke to the /. community's resident Windows user and he is refusing to come out his closet unless you will personally guarantee that the hoard of torch and pitchfork wielding penguins outside won't tar and fether him.

fether? Is that a new compression algorithm I missed?

Re:Windows user

[Kraeloc]

That's not a pitchfork; the Daemon wields a trident.

It's a common mistake. Just remember: four tines, it's a pitchfork; three prongs, it's a trident.

Re:Windows user

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Apparently, 60% or so of Slashdot visitors are closet Windows users. I'd say we're at a disadvantage on our own turf:

http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/7687/2683439 70284721/1600/73421/slashdot%20linux.jpg

Re:Windows user

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Kind of. You see, once you label him as a Windows user with the feathers, half an hour later what's left of him will be so small that you could transport or store it in a tiny fraction of the space originally required. Rumour has it that the algorithm is somewhat lossy, however.

Re:Windows user

[n9hmg]

It's a common mistake. Just remember: four tines, it's a pitchfork; three prongs, it's a trident.

WRONG... it's not the tine count. It's the shape.
I have used a three-pronged pitchfork (as well as 4 and 5-tined pitchforks, and a 12-tined ensilage fork). A trident is a three-head spear (with the heads in a line instead of a triangle), and as such, the axis of the heads is parallel to the shaft. You don't want to stab and have the impact offset from the thrust, or worse, have an impaled opponent fall in such a way as to trap your weapon. A pitchfork is a material-handling tool, with the tines offset from the shaft in order to permit better retention of the load.

Re:Windows user

[Kraeloc]

True indeed. I was just trying to give a simple rule of thumb for images in advertising and the like.

Consider that most people think trident means a brand of gum, and you see my point. Simply pointing out that a difference existed was my goal.

Re:Windows user

[Drooling Iguana]

That's just 'cause we all browse from work.

Re:Windows user

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that most people think trident means a brand of gum

You're on Slashdot, where 99% of the audience has participated in Dungeons and Dragons at some point in their "lives". They know what a trident is.

Re:Windows user

[LilGuy]

Honestly, Dungeons and Dragons was always a bit too much for me... and the fact that someone can recite all that nonsense about prongs being parallel to the shaft and whatnot is a scary.

I've always been a nerd and always will be, but that is beyond nerdism.

64 bit processors

[Anonymous Coward]

I use an AMD 64 3500 (Venice). These are now selling for $100 or so. The biggest advantage I have seen is that they run *much* cooler. The cpu fan spins much slower which reduces noise a lot. I'm not a gamer so I use a motherboard with onboard video which is excellent for 2D graphics - another fan gone.

The system is very quiet which is important to me.

The downside to the latest 64 bit processors is that they are virtualization platforms, so they are vulnerable to rootkits that run *below* the installed operating system. Ruskowska(?) the security expert believes that these processors should have been delayed a while until a suitable security defence had been developed.

Re:64 bit processors

[Anonymous Coward]

Apologies, the security expert's name is Joanna Rutkowska. Her article describing the
"blue pill" is here:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983037,00.as p

Re:um. 32 bit?

[VValdo]

Using Gmail and flash can be interesting for a 64-bit Linux distro - Mozilla just crashes

in 64-bit Gentoo, try this:

emerge mozilla-firefox
emerge netscape-flash
emerge nspluginwrapper

That should let you use the 32-bit flash in 64-bit firefox.

W

Not a valid question.

[Anonymous Freak]

The valid question is "Are you switching to a 64-bit Operating System?"

Name one major processor currently available that ISN'T 64-bit. Athlon has been 64 bit for a few years, Even Sempron is 64-bit now. Pentium 4, Pentium D, and even Celeron have been 64-bit for over a year. The only major chip that ISN'T 64-bit is Core Duo, and that is being totally eclipsed by Core 2 Duo now. (I'm not even touching the server space, which is likewise all 64-bit.)

Software that runs fine on a 32-bit processor will run perfectly on a 64-bit processor. (Assuming you mean x86 architecture. I'm also not going to consider the possibility of switching to Itanium or other non-x86 64-bit ISAs.)

The real question is "Should I upgrade to 64-bit Vista?" or "Should I switch to a 64-bit build of Linux?" For Vista, I'll say sure. Vista alone will break enough stuff that you might as well go all out. With Linux, I'd say stick with what works, unless you specifically have a 64-bit compiled application that will benefit from the extra registers that the 64-bit extensions add, or that will specifically take advantage of more than 4 GB of memory per thread.

As for Mac OS? It's already 64-bit on 64-bit architectures, for the UNIX-layer. And Leopard will be fully 64-bit on 64-bit architectures, no choice on your part.

32bit improvement

[john_is_war]

Well the 64 bit processors have a larger L2 cache, which does cause an improvement for 32bit applications.

64-bit the future... but

[ricky-road-flats]

In my business, we're completely 32-bit right now, and we will stay the same for a while. We've decided to stay with 32-bit XP until there are compelling reasons to move to 64-bit, at which point we'll go 64-bit Vista.

On the server side we'll go 64-bit when the apps demand it (Exchange 2007 for instance).

Don't Bother With XP64 Especially on Corp Network

[thomsonr]

XP64 never reached critical driver support. I do high end GIS at work and thought XP64 would be great for a workstation......wrong. I can't find drivers for many of the printers on the network and my scanner does not work. Also many of the software developers for don't support XP64 so if you have a problem they'll blame it on XP64 noteably Autodesk with their latest bug ridden Autocad Map program. Also during the Vista beta program I had nothing but trouble with Creative products using Vista 64. All problems disappeared when using Vista 32. I am removing XP64 from both my home and work computers. Not a chance I'd buy Vista 64.

Yes

[LauraW]

The new PC I built a home a couple of months ago had a Core 2 Duo in it, so it's 64-bit by definition. It's still running the 32-bit version of XP, though. I only put 2 Gb of RAM in it, so there didn't seem to be much point in installing XP-64. (I'm tempted to install Ubuntu on it instead, but I still use Photoshop and Quicken and a few other Windows-only apps occasionally.)

At work, I use a workstation with a 64-bit processor and 4 Gb of RAM. It's running a 64-bit Linux kernel but most apps run in a 32-bit user space. I'm not much of a Linux expert, but it seems to work quite well. All of the 32-bit desktop apps like Firefox and Flash work just fine, but I can still use all of the memory on the box and can run applications compiled for 64-bit mode when I need to. Now I just have to talk someone into buying me a box with a faster processor and even more RAM.

XP-64

[mcbridematt]

XP 64 is a workstation OS (and has always been marketed that way by Microsoft, FYI). Unless you're doing heavy stuff, or your hardware loves it (i.e Dual Opterons with NUMA), stay out. You can chuck all your older hardware while you're at it too. Personally I haven't had any real problems with it, apart from it being a massive I/O hog.

XP 64 is based on the WinServer 2003 x64 base, and IMO, Server 2003 x64 makes a better 64 bit workstation OS. I guess M$ frucked up big time when adding all the consumer end stuff to it. Pity 2003 x64 doesn't have the full multimedia support that its 32 bit version does.

No issues here..

[Pluhveso]

I am currently running Windows XP Professional x64 with 64-bit processor types nearly since its release.

The only potential hiccup I encountered was finding an x64 driver for my HP printer; but there is a nice group that came out with drivers that while they claim aren't perfect, I have never had any problems with (both printing and scanning).

If you've ever low-level coded for x64 it can be slightly more painful or new; but its definitely worth it in the end (as well as multi-core).

I made the switch about a year and a half ago

[heffel]

About a year and a half ago I bought an AMD 64 laptop. I dualboot 64bit Fedora and 32 bit XP (came preinstalled, hardly ever use it).

The only (minor) problems I've had is that there is no 64 bit version of the Java plugin, and there is no 64 version of Flash player, therefore I run a 32 bit version of Firefox with the 32 bit version of the Java plugin and Flash player.

I'm still on FC 5, which includes a 32 bit version of OpenOffice.org, runs just fine (I heard that FC 6 includes a 64 bit version of OO.o).

Ubuntu x64 here

[Orange Crush]

Add me to the tally of folks running 64 bit Linux. For most purposes, the performance boost is unnoticable. However, I do get a few more FPS when transcoding video and I've noticed no other difficulties compared to 32bit Ubuntu. As others, I run 32 bit Firefox, but this is a breeze to install via automatix. About the only things that don't work for me are Google Earth and RealPlayer. I haven't bothered to look for others having similar troubles with Google Earth (app loads just fine, but imagery is all scrambled) and I don't care that much that RealPlayer barely runs (skips, audio out of sync, hangs inexplicably . . . but it did that on 32bits too).

As far as general day to day use goes, if you've got a 64 bit proc w/ a 32 bit OS, it's probably not worth the hassle to reinstall 64 bit builds. If you're starting over from scratch anyway, you might want to give it a shot.

Re:Ubuntu x64 here

[tqft]

Could you please be a little more specific.

The mix of motherboard (Asus P5LD2-VM), Intel Core 2 Duo cpu and Ubuntu is Ok for the most part except for screwing up my optical drives. There is an outstanding bug #57502 (re JMicron chipsets) on this but eta is unknown.

Some more detail would help.

TIA.

Re:Ubuntu x64 here

[SLi]

I have been using Debian-amd64 for bit over a year now. In my benchmarks, the 64-bitness definitely helps performance; e.g. LAME (the mp3 encoder) is 50 % faster when compiled for amd64 than the x86 version.

I'm running Debian unstable, and I think things break a bit more often for 64-bit architectures than 32-bit. For example, recently apt-get source broke on 64-bit architectures. I think there are enough people however running 64-bit Debian to ensure no such flaws ever get to testing or stable. If you don't like to tinker with things like these, you obviously shouldn't run unstable.

There are some issues you might want to consider. I think there still is no Flash plugin, should you want that (I wouldn't install it on my computer if I could). Wine doesn't work, neither does MPlayer support win32 codecs. Also OpenOffice was for years very badly broken on 64-bit architechures (apparently it had so much hardcoded 32-bitisms). Debian unstable (and possibly testing?) has recently gained a 64-bit OpenOffice. I would assume it's still not quite as stable as a 32-bit version, but it's definitely getting there. I run MPlayer from a 32-bit chroot, that works nicely but is a bit of a hassle. I also run OpenOffice from the chroot, but that's just a relic from the times when there was no working 64-bit OO, so I can't comment on the stability of the 64-bit version.

Overall I'm very happy with amd64-Debian.

Re:Ubuntu x64 here

[Orange Crush]

Could you please be a little more specific.

-Biostar GeForce6100/nforce 410 mobo
-AMD-64 3500+
-1 gig corsair ram kit (2x 512s on separate channels)
-1 300gig SATA drive
-2 150gig IDE drives (which I intend to software RAID(striping, RAID-0 IIRC) next time I'm in a tinkering mood)
-IDE Memorex DVD burner that was on sale at Staples a few months ago for ~$40. Works great, actually.

Once I find a reasonably affordable capture card that'll do HD off of component cables I would one day like this box to grow up to be a Myth back end and rig a front end into the entertainment center. Presently the most processor intensive task I use the current box for is ripping & transcoding DVDs and such. W/ 64 bit everything, Avidemux does XviD->Mpeg2 (DVD style & resolution) at around 50-55fps on average. DVD-XviD rips run around 30-35fps. As a very rough guestimate, same stuff w/ 32bit builds was about 10fps lower. I was tinkering with filesystems (switching to ReiserFS from Ext3) and accidentally ruined my root partition so figured "screw it, if I'm reinstalling, let's give x64 a spin."

Re:Ubuntu x64 here

[tqft]

Thanks

The amd cpu people are OK - people with Intel Core 2 Duo seem to be having the problems - supporting (or lack thereof) chipsets.

Re:Ubuntu x64 here

[tqft]

If you want some flash the latest version of vlc (0.8.6)has the latest ffmpeg which can do a lot of the flash out there. There is a firefox addon Media Player Connectivity which can be very useful for configuring this stuff (or to point at mplayer).

not sure about youtube flash.

Or you could give gnash a go if you really need flash.

64 is better on Linux than Windows

[darkonc]

From what I've seen people using Windows-64 have had far more problems than people running Linux. Linux 64 bit support has been out for a long time now and is pretty stable.

XP-64 seems to have all sorts of driver problems that are unlikely to go away as Vista comes out.

Vista-64 has the problem that you've got the uncertain future of a heavily DRMed machine. This may or may not prove to be a show-stopper, so I'd say wait and see..

Re:64 is better on Linux than Windows

[Alpha830RulZ]

I've been running 64 bit fedora for a couple of years on a stable of servers, and it's been dead stable. We do heavy compute applications, no GUI/graphics. We needed the address space, and it has been great for us. We're running on dual AMD Opterons.

DEC Alpha

[Anonymous Coward]

I've already been using 64-bit processors for over 10 years now, they're called DEC Alphas.

Oh wait, you meant 64-bit x86.

64-bit Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

AFAIK, Sun has been shipping 64 bit JVMs for years..?

Re:64-bit Java

[GigsVT]

Yeah, but they hide the links on their site. If you use Google with some magic terms you can find the links.

Hopefully once everything is GPL with Java we can just apt-get sunjre and it'll all work. Sun has tried their best to make Java impossible to install and run. I don't get what they are thinking.

64 bit Operatings Systems

[calidoscope]

The valid question is "Are you switching to a 64-bit Operating System?"
SGI Irix and OSF/1 on Alpha users switched over a decade ago, Solaris went 64 bit on Sparc in 1998 and 64 bit on AMD64 in 2005.

The 32 to 64 transition was handled better on Solaris than on Linux (Sun had a lot of practice with supporting Solaris on 32 and 64 bit Sparc's before tackling the 32 to 64 bit transition on x86) as there is a standard way of providing both 32 and 64 bit bit support in applications and drivers.

Kind of fun seeing another transition, having lived through the 8 to 16 bit era (early 1980's) and the 16 to 32 bit era (1986-1995).

Switch? I've had 64-bit since 1999...

[Anonymous Coward]

with my Sun Ultra-1, running Solaris (and Linux). Maybe 64-bit is new for you johnny-come-lately x86 types, but not for me.

For clients?

[MindStalker]

Are you building these machines for clients. Unless some specifically ask for XP-64 I wouldn't install it. Personally dispite all compatibility claims I've run across a lot of software that won't install correctly on XP-64 for no good reason. (Apparently the "reason" is that installers are often written in 16 bit, but I've even come across recently made applications whos installers will tell me they won't install on XP-64 and give me no way around).

64-bit Vista works well

[rbonine]

I've been running Vista since Beta 2 and decided to hold my breath and try the 64-bit version when the RTM was released to MSDN a month or so ago. So far, much to my surprise, it's been rock solid. it worked with every piece of hardware I have, including a Dell dual-tuner TV card, a no-name Web cam, a couple of digital cameras, and my ATI X1300 video card. No software problems to speak of either - the only thing I can think of that didn't work right off the bat is the MS SyncToy application.

I can't speak to WinXP 64-bit, but I can highly recommend it on Vista.

I've been running 64 bit for over a year

[CCW]

For Linux, there is no downside. Everything just works. I've tried Ubuntu, Suse and CentOS without any issues (related to 64 bit code).

For Windows, I've been running Win2k3 64 bit. There are a ton of devices that have no drivers. Lots of subtle bugs, none of them major but it isn't usable as a dev/test machine since any issue has to be replicated on WinXP. Unless you are running SQL Server, don't bother with 64 bit windows. (and even then only bother if that is about all you are doing) 64 bit SQL server has some issues as well that make running it in production a pain.

64 bit hardware vs. 64 bit software

[wolrahnaes]

The hardware is ready. As others have mentioned, it's basically impossible now to buy a 32 bit desktop (the only one I know of still for sale is the Mac Mini) and the laptops will follow as soon as Intel phases out the original Core line.

Personally I've been 100% 64 bit on the hardware side for a while now. Athlon 64 X2 in my desktop, Core 2 Duo in my laptop, and even a triple-core 64 bit "Xenon" PowerPC derivative in my game console (though I recently sold that for a Wii, I'm not sure whether "Broadway" is 64 bit or not).

Software, it's a different story. I'd have no problem running a 64 bit OS on a server or workstation where I can be certain it'll be doing a set group of tasks, but on the desktop no way.

On both Windows and Linux, drivers are the biggest issue. Linux obviously less than Windows, because all but my video drivers are open source and many were 64 bit ready before AMD ever shipped a single Opteron, but the user-level 64 bit support is less. On Windows, it was mainly driver issues and a few games that balked at the NT 5.2 (Win2003) kernel under XP64. On Linux, the biggest problem was related to plugins and codecs. I didn't have Flash or Java in my web browser and a lot of codecs either weren't there or required building from source which I prefer not to do if I have a choice. I know I could have installed 32 bit Firefox and the 32 bit plugins would have worked, but just like with the codecs it was more work than I was willing to put in to it.

In both cases 64 bit gained me nothing other than being able to say I'm running in 64 bit mode while causing quite a bit of extra work. The tradeoff wasn't worth it, so I went back.

Depending on how things develop, I might try 64 bit Vista a few months after the official release, and of course Leopard will bring my Macbook a fully 64 bit OS, but for now I'm happy with 32 bit Vista on the desktop, 32 bit Tiger on the laptop, and 32 bit Ubuntu on both.

64 bit - drivers

[mabu]

About two months ago I installed XP-64 on a new Athlon system I was upgrading. I didn't realize that I'd have to update all my drivers and some software might not work, but the biggest problem was the drivers, however, I custom-built this PC and used popular components so, with the exception of AVG Free (which doesn't have a 64-bit version), I was able to upgrade my entire system. If you're running more obscure peripherals, you should fully-research the availability of drivers before you upgrade.

Re:64 bit - drivers

[TheThiefMaster]

For a free 64-bit virus scanner I recommend Avast! Home edition. Just sign up and they send you a free 2-year license key. When your key runs out just sign up again.

I moved away from AVG because I had a virus break straight through it once, and when I found out they didn't have a 64-bit version either I went looking elsewhere.

Re:64 bit - drivers

[mabu]

I did just that. I switched to Avast. But it's really annoying. When I first installed it, it started going off for phishing e-mails in my inbox. I had been really happy with AVG but I think the quality of their products and attention to detail is now waning.

Re:Don't Bother With XP64 Especially on Corp Netwo

[mabu]

I agree. I upgraded a Win98 system and planned to go to XP and I figured I'd update my motherboard to an Athlon while I was at it. XP64 pro was cheaper than regular XP Pro, so I opted for that. I didn't realize I'd get into a huge scavenger hunt to make sure all the drivers and software would work. And I did this late in the game. There does not appear to be that many vendors supporting XP64 as you'd think.

This laptop is 64-bit...

[Anonymous Coward]

...& it runs Linux just fine.

Other than it going faster & being able to drive more RAM than I could afford, there’s no obvious difference between 32 & 64 bit machines as far as Linux was concerned. I had a couple of driver issues at the start, but that’s because the laptop maker chose fancier, better-integrated chips than they had to, not because of 64-bitness. It still uses less power than Windows even though not all of the ACPI stuff is perfectly happy (again, motherboard-too-fancy, not 64-bitness).

The built-in modem works. The wireless works. The wired LAN-card works. The USB2 works. The SATA DVD works. The video works. The sound works (even the crappy little built-in mic works). The SATA hard-drive works. The IEEE488 and FireWire and serial port all work. It all lights up as it should. What more could I ask?

I've been 64-bit for a decade and a half

[Anachronda]

Y'all are a bit slow on the uptake. Exactly 15 years ago, I was hip-deep in my first 64-bit project: a device-driver for the then-upcoming Alpha version of VMS.

Alpha VMS was great then and it's only gotten better.

Re:I've been 64-bit for a decade and a half

[Anonymous Coward]

Alpha VMS was great then and it's only gotten better.

Yeah, until they killed the greatest processor family that ever lived.
And then as for VMS, HP has put a stake through its heart, shot it with a silver bullet, tied a rock to it and threw it in a lake, put Polonium in its cosmo, tied it to the railroad tracks, covered it in chum and threw it overboard at the Farallon Islands http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA3160/ http://www.prbo.org/cms/index.php?mid=171, labelled it as a terrorist, told the DEA it had sold them an 1/8 of pot, forced it to be a test pilot for the V-22 Osprey, dumped it down "the hatch", made it spend 2004 xmas vacation in Thailand, gave it large quantities of Tylenol and vodka and still they could not kill it.

Only by feeding it to the zombie they were keeping alive at great cost to themselves and the world of computing, could they finally kill it: Feed it to the Itanic

Here is some propaganda from HP: http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:8EmG0Zj2VmcJ:h 71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/integrity/faqs2.html&hl= en&lr=&strip=1
Funny thing is that all of their "devil's advocate" questions are more true today than the HP well worded and "backed up" responses.

HP & Compaq: Killing the path to future that DEC had marked out in order to keep us awash in mediocre x86 and Itanic crap.

Switching?

[dangitman]

I've already had dual 64 bit chips in my Macs for the last couple of years.

Sorry, about XP-64 I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and am not really interested in finding out. XP is so frustrating to shoehorn ones-self back into after using an OS with real flexibility (and a mouse which works all of the time, swipe-middle-click being so much easier than swipe, Ctrl-C, click, Ctrl-V when repeated n times).

Re:Sorry, about XP-64 I don't know...

[lanc]

yeah, unix-style copypasting is nice - though it has its drawbacks too - ever tried to mark some text selected and then change it with this method?

Yes, In theory.

[Anonymous Coward]

In my head, I'm already running a quad core dual SLI setup. It has two Terrabytes of HD space, 8 GB of ddr2 ram and a 24" widescreen LCD monitor. I'm also playing Crysis and Supreme Commander on it.
However, in real life, I have an athlonXP 2900+ with a DDR ram, an agp 6600 GPU, and about 750 GB of HD space.

Some day...

There's no reason not to go 64

[Anonymous Coward]

I know all AMD chips that can do 64 can also do 32 in a "protected" mode, not sure about intel.

64 chips have more upgradeability, plus they just seem way faster.

Been using 64 bit for years....

[Fallen Kell]

... just not Windows :D

Lets see, can anyone say Sparc and RISC? Anyway, if you mean x86_64, then, yes, you pretty much will be purchasing a 64bit capabile processor, as all but the mobile lines are now x86_64 from both Intel and AMD. However, as you have noted, Windows XP-64 is another issue. MS decided that they were going to test out some of their lockdown controls for drivers and hardware, basically a test run for when they release Vista so they could work out some of the more nasty "features" *cough* bugs *cough* that they want to introduce. As a result, all drivers must pass windows certification before being released, which is a hell of paperwork and processes to have done, especially when new hardware is so dependent on their drivers being updated (look at GPUs for instance where you might have a new driver every other week). This introduces a huge delay into those updates being released, and thus many companies simply do not deal with the hassle involved. They might release one version of the driver for Windows XP-64, but it most definitely is not maintained anywhere near as often as the 32bit XP driver branch. Again, all because MS wanted to see what kind of issues this would cause in their upcomming OS, Vista.

NT for Alpha was 32 bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though the Alpha was a 64 bit CPU, NT for the Alpha was ALWAYS 32 bit, they never had any 64 bit versions of Windows until the 64 bit versions of 64 for Itanium a couple years ago.

Not really worth it

[StealthyRoid]

I've run both WinXP 64 and the 64 bit beta of Vista, and in both cases, it's simply not worth it. There's a very small, almost imperceptible increase in the speed of some OS tasks, and there are two huge drawbacks for me: 1.) Driver support is AWFUL. ATI and NVidia have just started offering 64 bit drivers, and while everyone else may be on the bandwagon come boxed Vista release time, right now it's hard to find really simple things like soundcard drivers. 2.) Running processor/graphics intensive 32 bit apps (WoW, KOTR, Unreal, etc...) is not great, and since most applications only come in 32 bit versions, you'll be stuck with a performance hit exactly where you don't need it. If I had it to do again, I'd go with a dual-core processor over a 64 bit.

hardware yes - software no(t yet)

[CranberryKing]

The machine I am typing on is AMD64, but I wouldn't think of XP64 (although you can download the image unlike xp32). when I boot into linux i have lots of application problems because no one supports it yet.

Just forward planning. For a serious server application, of course. But for a real workstation, you are going to have all kinds of problems for a while.. xp and linux.

"People get ready"... for a while probably.

ok shit. Believe it.

I've been using them for years

[RAMMS EIN]

I've been using 64-bit CPUs for years, running NetBSD on a Sun Ultra 5. However, I can't say it holds any great advantages or disadvantages for me. That's just the CPU that happened to be in it. The open source software I use runs fine on all CPUs I've tried to run it on. The same is definitely not true of Vista - at least, what I've seen from the AMD64 port is that lots of software doesn't work on it, and most drivers don't, either. Perhaps this will be fixed, but I do wonder why it's an issue, given that AMD made AMD64 backward compatible with x86. I have a AMD64 box here as well, and I can run x86 code or AMD64 code on it as I see fit, and x86 code under AMD64 Linux, with no problems.

Flash holding you back

[fourteagues]

If you look, Gnash (http://www.fsf.org) is the free GPL2 implementation of Flash, runs on a version 7 compatibility, and thus can be compiled for mozilla in 64 bit mode. It also builds in konqueror, that has done well with 64 bit builing before also.

It depends on your environment.

[Z00L00K]

I have tried both XP-64 and Linux in a 64-bit x86 distro and I can outright say that XP-64 seems to be more a special feature useful for those that really need the use of the 64-bit processing (larger memory available). This especially since the availability of drivers is a problem, but also that it lacks support regarding anti-virus and third-part firewalls. The built-in firewall is in my opinion not good enough.

On the other hand there is no reason to not use 64-bit Linux on a machine that is capable of 64-bit processing. Very few of the frequently used drivers are 32-bit only. The advantages is not only due to the fact that you are able to access large amount of memory, but you will have less problems with larger files (Above 2GB). If there are any real disadvantages I haven't seen them here.

If you plan for Vista - I don't see any reason to stick with 32-bit. This since it seems likely that the major focus on Vista development will be on the 64-bit variant. Remember that the recommended minimum RAM is 1GB and new applications are likely to use more RAM so the 4GB barrier present in 32-bit is not too far away.

Re:um. 32 bit?

[sporkme]

I am glad that flash-32-bit has been working in many Linux-64-BIT distros. This is a testament to the spirit of the hard-working folks behind our favorite flavors of the best OS. This does not excuse the dragging of feet on the part of Adobe. There needs to be a central release and some code for the aforementioned hard working people. RELEASE A LINUX-64-BIT VERSION OF FLASH NOW, you brown-nosed bastards. How can we make this any more clear?

welcome to the year 2006

[Anonymous Coward]

even xp-64 is now mature enough that you can use it without hazzles (you should look for drivers before buying your hardware though :P )

linux takes no thought, all big distros support 64bit, depending that you install 32bit compat libs you will still be able to do everything 32bit anyways if you wish (except the kernel layer)

its over a year now that i began switching to 64bit, so i have a mixed lan currently

from keyboard feeling you won't see any difference with both anyways, except you look with ldd/whatever tool you use on windows

I did, more than 10 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

The x86 world is 10-15 too late on almost everything. As user of real hardware I've been using 64bit operating systems for a decade already.

Glass

Re:I did, more than 10 years ago.

[CompMD]

Same here. The 64-bit fleet:

IBM AS/400 9402: IBM POWER RS64 running OS/400 V4R4
IBM AS/400 9406-500: IBM POWER RS64 running OS/400 V4R3
Sun Ultra 1 Creator3D: Sun/TI UltraSPARC I Hornet running Solaris 9
Sun Ultra 10 Creator: Sun UltraSPARC IIi running Solaris 10
Dell Precision 670: Xeon EM64T running XP64 and Suse 10.1

All the software I need to run on the IBMs and Suns works fine. The Dell is a nightmare to maintain, programs flat out DON'T RUN or act weird. Under Windows, CSi Concepts Unlimited (a professional CAD program) doesn't work, UGS NX4 didn't work right at first, and an ugly hack was necessary for my printer to work. Under Linux, NX4 works great, the printer prints, and the machine is noticeably quicker.

question about paths in 64bit xp

[Anonymous Coward]

in a post someone stated: "so I had to make some changes to the paths but after that all works well"
what do you have to change in the paths in order to get 32bit apps to play nicely in xp64? I'm thinking of using xp64, so I'd like to learn...;)

thanks in any case :)

64 Bit been Around for years

[problemchild]

I would say that this whole 64 bit thing is a mute point. 64 Bit CPUs have been around for years even on the desktop SPARC/POWER series etc and more to the point almost all the performance Intel/ AMD will have gone that way. 64 Bit O/S's have been slower on the uptake, Solaris and Linux x64 works fine and has much better support as late. Windows 64 Bit seems to be slower off the mark but then maybe the urge for a 64bit games Console isn't quite there ;).

Apple switched me to 64-bit

[Sentry21]

I recently upgraded from a Core Duo Macbook to a Core 2 Duo Macbook. Now I'm running a 64-bit chip (in 32-bit mode). When Leopard comes out, I'll be running 64-bit.

I don't notice now, because 64-bit doesn't really give me anything extra. I won't notice then either, because I can't fit more than 2G in this thing anyway. The only benefit I could see would be the ability to mmap() large files, thanks to the larger memory space. Woo.

Switched years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm typing this on a Dual 2Ghz G5 PowerMac, while watching a job in an xterm that is running on a Compaq XP1000 (the CPU is a 667Mhz 21264 Alpha, and the OS is OpenVMS), plus I am sitting next to a 500Mhz XP1000, and a dual 750Mhz UltraSparc III.

What took you all so long to make it to 64-Bit? I've been here for nearly 10 years, and know people that have been for even longer.

Z.

Copy protection strikes again

[Myria]

The #1 reason many games don't work in XP 64 is because games install copy protection kernel drivers that don't have a 64-bit version. Certainly the latest games don't have this problem, but anything older than a year or so does. Installing a crack frequently fixes the issue by eliminating the need for the driver, but that makes you a felon unless you can convince a judge and/or jury that the latest Library of Congress exemptions apply.

The lack of 64-bit hardware drivers is slowly sorting itself out. Eventually, the only real issue will be older games. Microsoft's denial of WHQL certification for drivers that don't have both 32- and 64-bit forms is likely to make almost all new hardware come with both types of drivers.

64-bit is great for many types of servers. Databases can mmap()/MapViewOfFileEx() the entire database, which is a win even if you don't have that much RAM. Authentication servers can do modular exponentiation much faster, which is necessary for things like SSL and SRP.

I won't go to Vista because of its driver signing.

64-bit IRIX systems...

[Ocelot Wreak]

Hey, Some of us have been developing and running on 64-bit OS web servers for years. I have an old (obsolete) 12 processor sgi Challenge M supercomputer I was given for free about 6 years ago. It runs 64-bit IRIX and serves up web pages super-fast. You can develop and test on a few processors while dedicating the rest of the machine to the web server functions. And, it keeps your feet warm when you need some extra heating by your desk. Nice. Regards, Ocelot Wreak

Re:Why would I? - HD Limit

[brownaroo]

Isn't the 32 Bit limit for Hard Drives 2.2 terabytes?
I don't know of too many desk tops this will effect.

x64 Support

[ivonic]

I got myself an AM2 processor and mobo last week, and have been using Windows XP x64 since then. Driver support is a really big hassle for any nonstandard hardware. All my usual stuff works fine, but my phone and webcam refuse to work. Software has also been an issue, with me so far being completely unable to find a working DVD application, and I've resorted to using a Virtual PC with XP x86 on. Whilst I can see the benefits of 64-bit computing, the industry seems wholly unprepared for the move they're encouraging us to do. So long as you have 2gig of RAM or under, stick with XP Pro.

64 bits is old hat on other systems

[spaceyhackerlady]

I went to 64 bits in 2000 on Sun hardware. Whether your OS is Solaris or Linux, you run a 64 bit kernel and can compile and run programs in either 32 or 64 bit mode. For a while this meant using different compilers for building kernels (remember egcs?), but that has long since been sorted. Other than the usual playing around, it's just now that I have an application that is crowding 4 GB of address space and could actually use 64 bits. Either that or rewrite its database interface so it doesn't mmap() a great big file to save stuff in. :-)

Don't do 64 bits because it's cool and trendy, or because you are looking for some sort of panacea. Do 64 bits because it solve problems and creates new opportunities. While it's (naturally) Sun- and Solaris-centric, Sun's 64 bit migration guide is a good place to start.

...laura

64-bit codecs eh?

[FatSean]

I'll have to go looking for them, and see some bench marks.

dunno why I never though of that.

/3G (Re:Make a list)

[mi]

You can start many applications with the additional switch /3G, which will cause Windows to split the 4Gb of the process' address space 3:1 between user and kernel space instead of the default 2:2. But that's it...

Windows is not the only OS like this. On AIX 32-bit processes are also limited to 2Gb, for example, while on Solaris you have your entire 4Gb.

That said, if maximum memory is not an issue for your program (as is usually the case), it is quite convenient (and fast) to have the same address space across user and kernel parts of the process. And 64-bit gives you both (even if all the pointer-fields in your structures double in size...)

mmap() is BIG (Re:Apple switched me to 64-bit)

[mi]

The only benefit I could see would be the ability to mmap() large files, thanks to the larger memory space. Woo.

Nothing to sneeze at here. This ability (afforded by sizeof off_t == sizeof size_t) is a boon. The ugly I/O-and-process loops can go away now, with the I/O part handled by the kernel.

Not many currently are, but all kernels can be a lot smarter about that I/O than a (portable) application will ever be. Kernel knows about itself (presumably), the hardware, and the other processes currently running — factors, that a portable app can not be expected to take into account.

Having mmap-ed a file, you should be able to madvise the kernel on your planned usage (random? sequentional?). mmap offers huge potential, but its use was hampered by the differences in the above-mentioned sizeofs. Whereas a lot of smart optimizations went into the implementations of read and write, mmap was often just implemented, but not optimized by the OSes. This may now change...

There is still a potential problem with mmap-ing too many large files into the same process and thus running out of address-space anyway. But, practically, this is not going to affect anyone for a very long time — I don't think, any apps relies on being able to have more than a few thousands file-descriptors simultaniously and those on the higher end of this estimate hold most of these assets in sockets rather than mmap-able files/devices.

Vista 64 is a whole different story

[ZahnRosen]

And if you think it doesn't matter just wait 6 weeks until it hits retail on 1/30/07. Try it!

From personal experience...

[NerveGas]

I'm typing this on an XP-64 machine. The driver hastles DO NOT outweigh any benefits except for one: Memory management. If you need huge amounts of memory in a machine, and your app is 64-bit as well(*), then it's an easy win. If not, then it's just not worth it.

    (*) Sometimes, a 32-bit app will still benefit. Photoshop is one, under Win32, it can only use 2 gigs of memory. Under Win64, it can use up to around 3 gigs, depending on your hardware. Still, with a 64-bit version, it would be able to use anything you could stuff in your DIMM sockets.

      64-bit Linux is vastly better, and IBM's contributions to the NUMA code really make it shine on the Opterons. I run it on Opteron-based machines with anywhere from 2 to 8 sockets, and it does terrifically. Wait until you see how fast an RDBMS can run when your 10 gigs of data all fit into your *disk cache*. Turn off fsync if you really, really trust your hardware and software, and watch things fly.

Word to the wise...

[jd]

...it's important that such a list, if you make one, lists what you want the system to do WELL, not just do. 64-bit systems will do certain tasks far far better than 32-bit ones. If such tasks are likely, then the ability for a 32-bit processor to perform the task may simply not be good enough. Part of this is to look at return on investment - if you get an improvement in performance of X for a cost multiplier (for the whole system) of Y, what's the ratio? Perhaps you'd do better with two lower-grade systems acting as a cluster, or a single system with more CPUs or cores per CPU.

There is, in theory, nothing that a 64-bit system can do that a 32-bit system (if programmed well enough) cannot do at all. To examine what is possible, then, is a little pointless. The difference is solely performance per unit of something (space, time, money, power) and so that is the only difference worth measuring. Anything else you can navigate around - it may take a little more effort, but it can always be done.

64Studio (Debian)

[Amphiaurus]

Check out 64Studio http://64studio.com/. I've been running it for a while on an AMD64 3200, 2G RAM. Works great. Considering that I upgraded from an 800 MHz Duron, my opinion re: speed doesn't count for much. Obviously this machine *smokes* the Duron. Recently I've been having some problems with video going all shakey (side to side) which I suspect is coming from my cheap video card (low-profile nVidia gForce 7300, 128 MB RAM, PCI Express bus), but otherwise I'm pleased with the box's performance. Btw, the base system is Debian pure 64-bit.

New Expert-Seek advice relationship tool. Skype3.0

[nirmalkit]

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Re:Don't Bother With XP64 Especially on Corp Netwo

[thomsonr]

I removed XP64 yesterday at work and will likely remove it at home during the holidays. Now all my printers are available, my scanner works. I hope Vista 64 is better supported.

Chip size and heat

[phorm]

One of the things not mentioned on here that might be worthy is the chip size+heat issues. A lot of my earlier Athlons ran quite hot, and often required extra cooling etc during the summer. My Opteron (well yes, it's an Opteron so in general better than an Athlon) runs much cooler, and I've heard from people with Athlon-64's that this seems to be the case as well. It seems the actual die of the CPU is bigger, so we've theorized that the larger surface area allows for better contact with the heatsink, and thus more efficient heat dissipation. Could also be that it's a better chip for heat than previous 32-bit Athlons, but perhaps some others could comment on this?

Ah well...

[McNihil]

I have been using and owning 64 bit processor systems since 1996 you insensitive clod.

Redhat AS4 64bit

[Servo]

We're rolling out new servers running quad dual core AMD 64bit CPU's with Redhat AS4 64bit version. They are screamers and I haven't had any problems with them in general, or running 32bit apps. The key to smooth running on the 32bit apps is to make sure you have all the 32bit versions of the shared libraries installed.

pitchforks versus tridents

[infolation]

/. needs a 'TMI' tag

64-bit? It's a little too late.

[segin]

From the introduction of the first 64-bit processors in 1993 with the 64-bit Alpha CPU, it has taken 13 years for 64-bit to gain "any real acceptance". I can't speak for others, but I am sure that this technology should have been pushed out like mad 5 years ago.

Mixing 64-bit hardware with 64-bit software

[phoenix_rizzen]

The standard seems to be heading towards 64-bit processors ...

The standard *is* 64-bit CPUs. It's virtually impossible to buy a pure 32-bit CPU new. P3s are no longer for sale. P4s are no longer available in a lot of places. The Pentium-M/Core CPU is soon to be phased out. The AMD Duron and early Semprons are no longer available. Everything that is available (Xeon, Core2, Athlon64, Turion, Sempron, Opteron) are all 64-bit CPUs. I'm pretty sure even the Celerons now are 64-bit.

However, they can all run 32-bit software, as well as 64-bit software. So the question is not whether to buy 64-bit hardware (yes, you should) but whether to buy/use 64-bit software.

On the desktop, I'd say no. Unless you are doing something that requires more than 4 GB of RAM, there's really no need to run a 64-bit desktop OS.

On the server, I've say yes. Even if you aren't using more than 4 GB of RAM now, it much nicer to just pop the case open, add more RAM, and keep going ... without having to reinstall the OS and apps.