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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."
Erm... AMD64 doesn't mean AMD proc's.
Stop spreading FUD. 64 bit executables have smaller code. The larger executable size is due not to the increase in code size but to the unwind tables. On i386 executables are typically compiled with the frame pointer model, where functions store the current frame address (the start point for local variables) on the stack. On x86_64 the normal method is to let the compiler figure out where the local variables are based on the stack pointer. This way there is at least one memory access removed.
Omitting frame pointers incurs the cost of emitting a table of function information to allow C++ exceptions to walk back up the stack. This information is stored in the .ehframe section of the executable and only needs to be loaded when the application throws an exception. This section is not part of the working set. It is also not used by pure C programs. So, although the executable size is larger on x86_64, the extra space it is consuming is on the disk, not your CPU cache.
Yes, you always benefit from building everything for x86_64 if your OS is x86_64. And unless you are running some application where benchmarks definitively show a performance decrease in the 64 bit version, there is no reason whatsoever to run 32 bit any more. Drivers are no longer a problem. So stop spreading FUD!