AMD64 with only 3GB RAM work good?

[Andrew Reilly]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 02:41:00AM +0530, Saurav Bhasin wrote:
> I need to install AMD64(64 bit) on my Lenovo Thinkpad Laptop which has
> a RAM memory of only 3GB
> 
> My other laptop specs are:
> 
> Processor: Intel Core 2 I(Duo) processor T9500 - 2.60 Ghz.
> RAM: 3GB RAM.
> Nvidia GM150 Graphics.
> 
> Would amd64 work well with a 3GB RAM ?.

It will be fine with the 3G RAM: amd64 can handle much more
memory than ia32, but it doesn't need significantly more:
program size and data size are usually fairly comparable.
Depends a bit on the density of pointers and linked structures.
Code and non-pointer data is essentially the same size.

What *won't* be totally fine is the Nvidia graphics card.
Nvidia provide a closed-source driver only for ia32, and the
open-source drivers work so well that I switched to ATI on my
amd64 desktop system (and have been happy ever since.)

> I need my laptop for Programming, scientific calculations and heavy
> mathematical stuff.

So lack of whizzy 3D accelleration is probably not a big deal:
you might get by with the nv (open source) driver.
Languages, compilers and numerical libraries all work very nicely
in amd64.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew