Nick Holland wrote:
Alexander Hall wrote:
What is the recommended architecture to use for Intel's Core2
(Dual/Quad) processors?
I have two computers I'm considering going amd64 on:
...
I've found the following (likely incomplete) list of things that may
affect the choice, or might be affected by it, are:
- Memory (4GB limit)
- W^X
W^X is available on most OpenBSD platforms, including i386 and amd64.
From http://openbsd.org/amd64.html:
"(Some Intel processors lack support for important PAE NX bit, which
means those machines will run without any W^X support -- it is thus
safer to run those machines in i386 mode)."
From my dmesg, i can see a "PAE", but I do not know if that's the "PAE
NX" bit...
- 64-bit instructions
as a user, you don't execute instructions directly, so this is mostly
just "bigger is better" hype, the same reason people get excited about
seeing all their cores in their dmesg on an app that a 100MHz Pentium
could do just fine on. Most of the same apps work on i386 as on amd64,
you really don't care what instructions are being executed (or how
many bits are in 'em) to make them run.
Yeah, I was just thinking it would make me to use the CPU cycles more
efficiently. I wouldn't expect anything drastic though.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq12.html#amd64Intel
And I even searched the FAQ... How could I miss this? Please accept my
apologies. :-d
To be honest, most users probably won't see a difference. Me? I'd
probably go with amd64, as practically speaking, i386 is slowly
moving into the "legacy" category. I say "probably", because I would
very possibly forget and accidentally install i386 on it. :)
Ok, based on the fact that I did that today already, let's say I'd
SUGGEST going with amd64, even though I'd probably forget and go with
i386 myself. :)
Ok, thanks!
/Alexander
