[Gllug] AMD64

[Doug Winter]

George Wright wrote:
> I'm going to be upgrading my desktop at Christmas to an Athlon 64 3500+ with 
> an Asus A8V motherboard hopefully. I have a couple of questions though as 
> this will be my first entry into high performance desktop stuff:
> 
> Any caveats regarding Linux support on AMD64? I presume I'll just be able to 
> use Linux in 32-bit mode as it's got all the native x86 instructions as well 
> as the x86-64 stuff. Is the Via chipset well supported on Linux? I don't 
> intend to use the hardware RAID or SATA stuff (yet), so that's a non-issue at 
> the moment.

Works fine in 32-bit mode - you'd never know it wasn't a 32-bit CPU, 
frankly.

If you fancy being a bit brave, the 64-bit Debian distro works very well 
(it's what I run my main desktop on - I am typing this on 64-bit 
thunderbird right now).

It's noticeably faster than running in 32-bit, and basically knocks 
anything Intel can do into a cocked hat.

You still need a 32-bit chroot for some stuff, but that works ok, 
although maintaining the chroot can be a minor pain.  A lot of 32-bit 
programs work ok using the 32-bit library stubs under 64-bit too.

Cheers,

Doug.

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