I've put together a couple of AMD-64 based systems and in general they feel "fast". The problem with that kind of an observation is that there's really no data behind it. Recently Infoworld reviewed an IBM Opteron (the commercial version of the AMD-64 family) and claimed that their testing showed that for heavy multi-tasking operations, the IBM system didn't are that well compared to Hyperthreaded Intel Xeon processor based systems. They did say that for single thread of execution model processes, the Opteron was the fastest X86 processor.
In the Linux world you can have an AMD-64 64 bit version of Linux from SuSe and I would assume RedHat would have one but I've only seen press on the SuSe version. Another issue would be that if you want 64 bit programs, you'd mostly need to build from source although that's a great strength of OSS. In a former life I worked at Digital/Compaq/HP in the UNIX group hosted on Alpha hardware. That platform started out as 64 bit and almost everything built for it was 64 bit. The areas where the Alpha dominated were search engines, large database applications and genomics research. I saw reports that it was a very competent web server as well. One of the first demonstrations of what you could do with a 64 bit Alpha was a million record sort on an Oracle database which took something like 60 seconds on the first large memory Alphas. I believe that Oracle simply read the entire database into memory and did the sort in core. They used 16 GB of RAM on the test machine. The customers that really loved those machines were the national labs and certain government agencies ;^). Over the years that I worked on the platform we fixed numerous pointer problems as well as lot's of lock and memory contention issues. There weren't that many problems directly related to 64 bit operations although I do remember and interesting file access problem that came about because a 32 bit operand was used in a > 4 GB file access. The fix was as simple as changing the declaration of the variable and the speedup in performance was very noticeable. -Alex _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss