Hardware requirement

[Garrett Cooper]

Reshmakov Roman wrote:
> We sucessfuly use amd64 arch on Intel Xeon CPUs.

EMT64 is fully compatible with the major features in AMD64. However, 
IA64 (64-bit architecture made by Intel in older Xeons) isn't compatible 
with AMD Opterons AFAIK. Besides, IA64 doesn't allow binary/library 
profiling and requires all stuff to be done in 64-bit whereas EMT64 and 
AMD64 do allow for 32-bit and 64-bit operation, simultaneously IIRC.

>> On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 12:56:04PM +0100, mukul choudhuri wrote:
> 
>>> Would U Plz. tell me about MAX amount of RAM freeBSD supports per
>>> processor in SMP systems?
> 
>> Depends on the architecture. A 32 bit x86 chip can address 4GB, unless
>> you have the PAE extension in the kernel. In that case it is 64
>> GB. Beware that some drivers are not compatible with PAE.

As Roland suggested, you should go with non-PAE 32-bit (in this case 
64-bit operating system) if you want more than 4GB of RAM. Look up the 
archives for this mailing list on recent discussion centered around this 
  topic.

>> The amd64 architecture has been tested with 8 GB.
>> For other architectures, see the release notes:
 >>
>> http://www.nl.freebsd.org/releases/6.2R/hardware.html 
 >>
>>> Does a dualcore system be considered as SMP system? Say an AMD X2 or Core2Duo?
> 
>> Yes, AFAIK.

Yes, they are. SMP = "Symmetric multiprocessor system", which includes 
hyperthreading, multi-processor, and multi-core capable CPUs (or some 
hybrid variant of the above).

>> Roland

-Garrett