What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 13, 2006 1:59 UTC (Wed) by richo123 (guest, #24309)
Parent article: What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux (Linux.com)

Hmmm I have read now in several places (including this) that you will notice little difference in desktop application speed with 64 bit versions of Linux distros.

I beg to differ. I have a dual em64t intel rig and I compared directly a 686 32 bit Ubuntu install with a amd64-xeon 64bit install. The difference was VERY MUCH noticeable to the extent that I am prepared to bear the disadvantage of codecs and flash. Actually there is a 32 bit version of firefox from the Ubuntu forum which even allows this without too much trouble. The difference in responsiveness of the gnome desktop is remarkable and I am at a bit of a loss to understand these recycled comments on how there is little difference in speed.

I use this machine as my main desktop and have noticed very few irritations....

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What you should (and shouldn't) expect from 64-bit Linux (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 13, 2006 3:06 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

I was under the impression that typical demanding apps would see around
20% advantage when built for amd64.

This should venture into user-noticable territory, if not obvious in some
cases.

well it's half-baked 64-bit system ;-P

Posted Sep 13, 2006 5:43 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

> The difference in responsiveness of the gnome desktop is remarkable
It's just plain horrible, considering the bogomips. Well, even if xeons suck on context switches, the more so as the clock gets higher since something was real time-based there... (intel em64t chipsets suck too, try getting proper i/o with e.g. 3ware 9xxx and 4+Gb RAM, you'll get (sw)iotlb surprize -- which can result in filesystem corruption; this is done in hardware in AMD64 CPUs and seemingly isn't done yet in intel *server* chipsets)

well it's half-baked 64-bit system ;-P

Posted Sep 13, 2006 12:45 UTC (Wed) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link]

The bogomips between an intel x86 3.4Ghz regular processor and the x86_64 xeon em64t processors (cache sizes the same) are actually identical (6800). The difference in responsiveness of gnome between the two is stark. Published benchmarks (Tom's Hardware) show the em64t and amd64 to have advantages in different areas.