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AMD64 Surpasses i386 As Debian's Most Popular Architecture
An anonymous reader writes with a quick note about the changing tides of computer architecture. From the article: "Bill Allombert announced [yesterday] via the Debian-devel mailing list that the X86_64 version of Debian has now surpassed all of the other supported architectures by a narrow margin. The most surprising part of this announcement however, and accompanying info-graphics provided on the Debian Popularity Contest page, is that this was not already true."
And Debian, no less. You don't pick Debian for 'new hotness'.
I still carry i386 minimal install CD's with me, but it's been feeling odd lately to have to use them on servers. Even some of my Atom machines can handle the AMD64 instruction set. It looks like i386 (especially -proper not i586+MMX) is destined to become a 2nd-rung arch along with MIPS, PPC, etc. At the same time kernel ARM support (e.g. OMAP) is really starting to mature. It looks like the two dominant arches the not-too-distant future will be ARM and AMD64.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It has started to actually work this year in Debian and *buntu distributions (on Debian use testing or unstable). Though you should be warned: You will likely end up with duplicates of all major libraries.
Executable files are slightly larger and there is no speed gain.
That depends on what applications you are running. Things that are math heavy can run significantly faster in 64-bit mode. As an example, RSA requires modular exponentiation of very large numbers. Algorithms to do this are comprised of a number of multiplications of equally large numbers. Since these numbers are on the order of 2048 bits, they need to be chunked into machine size blocks in order to actually do the multiplication. Having a 64-bit integer size already gives you at least a 2x speedup here because you have half as many blocks. Multiplication algorithms are also not quite linear (close to n log(n)) so it really gives you a bit more speed than that.
What I found more interesting is, if you look at the graphs, i386 installs are not decreasing. The rise of 64-bit installs appears to be coming either from new users or from other architectures. The level of i386 installs has remained fairly constant for the past several years. This suggests to me that people are no abandoning 32-bit builds.
On Ubuntu's download page it doesn't recommend using amd64, it recommends x86.
That's probably why Ubuntu shows less amd64 installs than x86. They could get with the times and recommend amd64 -- my 6 (or was it 7?) year old laptop even supports the amd64 instruction set.