[Nottingham] [Talk] This *THURS* 20/07/06: Linuxing snippets

[Martin Garton]

Thanks for the summary, Martin.

Just to expand on a couple of points.

> 64bit systems: No performance improvement unless your application does
> really need all 64 bits or a large address space, however getting a
> 64-bit system is a good idea for the sake of new hardware and attempted
> future-proofing;

Specifically talking about amd and intel 64 bit machines here, there is
some performance improvement due to the increased number of registers
available.  For some applications this can is significant.  There are
also cases of decreased performance reported simply because things get
bigger.  Copying 64 bits around in memory takes more work than 32.

> PCI-e is not well supported at present;

I think the main point was for gfx cards and free software drivers.  If
you have a PCI-e only system there are very few (if any?) cards that are
well supported by the free xorg free drivers.

-- 
Martin.