AMD64

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 04:41:46PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
> In response to Michael S <msherman77 at yahoo.com>:
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> > Any performance penalties when running x86 FreeBSD on
> > a 64-bit machine?
> 
> Performance is equivalent, except in a few corner cases.  Keep in mind that
> there are some cases where amd64 is actually slower, so it's really a wash,
> unless you know you're specific application will benefit from 64 bit.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Personally, I would stick with i386, unless you like to experiment.  Last
> time I tried to run amd64 on a desktop, I had lots of trouble with misc
> problems here and there.  Same machine running i386 is rock stable with
> no problems.  My gut tells me that a lot of desktop apps and libraries
> aren't really mature from a 64-bit standpoint yet.

I've been running amd64 on my desktop since 5.3 without any real 
problems. But I only picked hardware that had drivers available.

Some things to keep in mind:
1) no binary nvidia graphics driver 
2) no flash plugin
3) java is cumbersome.
4) no win32 codecs for mplayer

ad 1) I've got a Radeon 9250 that's supported by the native Xorg & DRI
driver, so no problem. I don't like binary-only drivers anyway.

ad 2) So no annoying flash ads either. :-) I can live with that.

ad 3) I don't use it anyway.

ad 4) Works fine without them, AFAICT.

Stuff like emacs, firefox, gimp, sane, imagemagick, audacious and
mplayer all work fine. I haven't tried openoffice, bacause it's huge
with lots of dependencies and I prefer LaTeX anyway.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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