AMD64

[Danny Pansters]

On Wednesday 18 April 2007 21:30:14 Michael S wrote:
> Good day all.
>
> I am getting my (first) Athlon 64 x 2 today or
> tomorrow and was wondering whether I should stick with
> the reliable x86 or try the  AMD64 port.

I'd try it but ...

> Any performance penalties when running x86 FreeBSD on
> a 64-bit machine?

... for some things it may ...

> Also what are the common problems, i.e. drivers,
> applications that are known not to work under the
> AMD64. This is going to be a desktop/workstation type
> system.

... there are quite a few 3rd party things that don't work or that need kludgy 
32bits emulation. Flash comes to mind, also (MS/Real/..) media codecs. All 
the stuff we love to hate.

Most importantly though, you can't use nvidia driver (32bit). I have a spare 
amd64 box with a nvidia based board (ASUS SLI something with the graphics 
card in a PCI Express slot, gforce4 IIRC) and I found I could only use plain 
(xorg) nv driver, and had to disable any hardware acceleration. Else it would 
just reboot randomly. I only use this machine to test kbtv on amd64. Moving 
the TV window around or resizing it is painfully slow (the video itself is OK 
but it eats a lot more CPU with non accelerated x rendering, up to 10%). 
Needless to say the machine is turned off most of the time...

So I think what matters is whether these things matter to you :) I don't think 
the base system is any faster or slower. But it depends on what you're going 
to use it for.

HTH,

Dan