AMD problem

Toomas Aas toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee
Tue Oct 18 02:02:48 PDT 2005


Fraser wrote:

> 
>          recently i have ordered "FreeBSD 5.4 CDs"
> from UK. Presently i am using "Celeron-600 on
> SiS-630". I know "FreeBSD" will work on my system.
> since i have Celeron i said to them that i have i386
> architecture. Now in the next month i want to purchase
> a new computer (as i have an old & quite slow
> machine). 
> 
> I am thinking of buying AMD-athlon-64. I know that
> FreeBSD will work on AMD64 architecture but what i do
> not know is will the same CDs will work for AMD64? 

There are two(*) separate versions of FreeBSD: one for i386 architecture 
and one for x86-64 architecture. Unfortunately I do not know whether the 
CD pack you purchased contains only i386 version or also the x86-64 version.

What I do know, however, is that you can run the i386 version of FreeBSD 
on Athlon64. That's because Athlon64 has hardware-level 32-bit emulation 
and it can run any 32bit OS. So even if you only have the CDs for i386 
version of FreeBSD, that's still no reason to not buy an Athlon64 machine.

Hope this helps.

(*) actually, there are more than two versions, but that's not relevant 
for our discussion here.
-- 
Toomas Aas


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