On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 15:43 +0100, Anthony Metcalf wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > On Tuesday 08 April 2008, Anthony Metcalf wrote:
> >  
> >> � � But what else? Will mtune=k6-2 make executables that will run on
> >> an Athlon 64? Anyone tried this? Would I get to a point where I could
> >> make -e world and have a nice working system?
> >>  
> >
> > k6 is 32 bit right?
> >
> > There's no sane upgrade path to amd64, looks like you are in for a
> > reinstall
> >
> >  
> Yes, 32bit, and Athlon 64s ran x86 last I heard :)
>
> The 64bit argument is one I will have to consider more deeply, but
> certainly in the near term, I won't gain anything from it, as I don't do
> *any* of the things the extended memory range is good for, and don't
> need more than 4GB RAM.......
>
> Later when I upgrade to a phenom, and stick 1GB RAM per core in there,
> then yeah, I will probably recompile into 64bit, but that can be done in
> a chroot, and migrated fairly easily I would expect, so long as the
> system is running.
>

It's not just the memory. Using 64bit gives your CPU some more registers
thus (possibly) making him faster and it speeds up 64bit calculations
(e.g. double precision floating point).

I don't think you'll need this for your purposes but I just wanted to
say: It's not just the 4 Gig.