Fw: To amd64 or not to amd64?

[Martin Cracauer]

Gary Jennejohn wrote on Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 01:49:36PM +0200: 
> 
> "alecn2002" writes:
> > The question is: will I have any benefits if I'll move to amd64 system, or it
> > 's safer and better to stay with i386 arch?
> > 
> [snip]
> > Problem-free operation and stability have precedense for me over system speed
> > 
> 
> The only real advantage of 64-bit over 32-bit is that you can put more than
> 4 GB of RAM into the box. If you don't plan to do that, then stick with
> i386. I've been using a dual-core AMD64 for a while now and I've decided to
> stick with i386.

This is incorrect.  32bit with PAE uses 4GB RAM and more just fine.

However, userlevel processes are limited to 3 GB virtual memory on 32
bit FreeBSD, each.

As for the original question, amd64 complicated things quite a bit as
some people need to keep some 64 bit stuff around, e.g. a firefox
chain for flash (I use a Linux chain anyway) and xine/mplayer for the
32 bit Windows dlls.  Also, no NVidia driver means you might have
lousy quality of the videos in question (although you certainly have
enough CPU power to live without video acceleration).

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer at cons.org>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go, today.      http://www.freebsd.org/