On 1/1/06, dondi_2006 <dondi_2006@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dave wrote: > > > The x86-64 architecture brings a bunch of additional features/ > > optimisations in addition to an enlarged address space. > > Very interesting! Which ones? Where are they discussed? Above all, > are they important for power desktop users? There are 16 general purpose registers rather than just the 8 in 32-bit mode. This means registers do not have to be pushed to the stack as often, resulting in fewer memory accesses, improving performance. I think that is the major one. A simple test with Blender (www.blender3d.com) a while back resulted in greater than 2x performance (took less than half the time) rendering an animation when using 64-bit Blender in 64-bit Fedora over 32-bit. I actually used Windows for the 32-bit version, I guess I really ought to test 32-bit program in 64/32-bit Linux as well, but just the magnitude of the improvement is impressive. In general things that require a lot of processing will probably see a significant performance boost. Interactive things (email, web browsing) can be done well on a fairly old machine because humans are slow (comparatively), so of course you won't really notice anything there. As far as processors/chipsets: AMD and nForce4. I have an Athlon 64 3500+ and an nForce4 based Gigabyte motherboard and they seem to work great with FC4 x86_64. Athlon 64s support frequency scaling (which you wanted), though I have not seen it do any (noticeable) CPU fan speed adjustments (using stock fan). But overall it is pretty quiet. Not silent but much quieter than my previous system (Athlon XP). Some noise is from the graphics card (nVidia GeForce 6600 GT) and you could probably stick with a fan-less one if you don't need great 3D graphics. Jonathan
