[gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
As I await my income-tax refund, I'm drooling over a couple of machines on a website that allows you to build to your own specs. One is an Intel P4 CPU 505 2.66GHz/533FSB/1M and the other is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+/1600FSB/512K CPU. Spec'ed out otherwise identically, the AMD comes out slightly less expensive; it's not significant. Is there any real advantage to be had with an Athlon 64? Does Gentoo do anything with the extra 64 bits? Also, I have a choice between a 64 meg ATI Radeon 7000 and a 128 meg Radeon 9250, at the same price. I have a Radeon 7000 working on an older machine right now. Are there any Gentoo issues with drivers for the 9250? -- Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure, and has a lower TCO, than linux. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
On Thu, 19 May 2005, Walter Dnes wrote: > As I await my income-tax refund, I'm drooling over a couple of > machines on a website that allows you to build to your own specs. One > is an Intel P4 CPU 505 2.66GHz/533FSB/1M and the other is an AMD Athlon > 64 3000+/1600FSB/512K CPU. Spec'ed out otherwise identically, the AMD > comes out slightly less expensive; it's not significant. Is there any > real advantage to be had with an Athlon 64? Does Gentoo do anything > with the extra 64 bits? Gentoo is one of the few distros that do... -- -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
On Thu, 19 May 2005 22:15:55 -0400 Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As I await my income-tax refund, I'm drooling over a couple of > machines on a website that allows you to build to your own specs. One > is an Intel P4 CPU 505 2.66GHz/533FSB/1M and the other is an AMD Athlon > 64 3000+/1600FSB/512K CPU. Spec'ed out otherwise identically, the AMD > comes out slightly less expensive; it's not significant. Is there any > real advantage to be had with an Athlon 64? Does Gentoo do anything > with the extra 64 bits? Gentoo runs in full 64-bit mode on the AMD64. Downside is some problems with binary only packages like Shockwave Flash. It works fine in 32-bit environements, like Opera on an AMD64, but no with Firefox or Mozilla. Also, if you have to have OpenOffice, it must be the binary version as the soucre still doesn't compile cleanly at 64-bits. If you play games, Cedega doesn't work very well, but UT2004 works fine in 64-bit mode, though the ATI 9250 pretty much sucks playing at anything over 800x600,. and generally kind of sucks there as well. An Nvidia 5200 works fine. Also, consider that the AMD64 will be cooler than the P4 - it runs around 65 W, while the P4 is around 85 W. > Also, I have a choice between a 64 meg ATI > Radeon 7000 and a 128 meg Radeon 9250, at the same price. I have a > Radeon 7000 working on an older machine right now. Are there any Gentoo > issues with drivers for the 9250? > Only that neither the Radeon Xorg driver nor the ATI driver support 16x10 - 1600x1024. They do fine at 4x3 - 1280x1024 and 16x9 - 1280x768, with the 9250. Well, they did, before the 9250 started dieing. Replaced it with an nVidia card, that does do 16x10 and all the rest. This reply brought to you by Gentoo on an AMD64 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] rsanders $ uname -av Linux chi 2.6.11-gentoo-r3 #2 Thu May 12 21:24:58 PDT 2005 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux Bob -- - Are you living in the real world? - -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
On May 20, 2005, at 3:15 am, Walter Dnes wrote: Is there any real advantage to be had with an Athlon 64? Does Gentoo do anything with the extra 64 bits? I'd think that 64-bits would be disproportionately more useful than none at all!! ;P Stroller. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
On Thu, 19 May 2005 22:15:55 -0400 Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | Does Gentoo do anything with the extra 64 bits? 64 bit code is actually slower than 32 bit code for anything except certain dedicated applications. What you do gain is increased address space, which only makes a difference if you're going over (for x86/amd64) about 900MBytes of RAM. However... amd64 is not just x86 extended to 64 bit. By using 64 bit mode you're gaining a whole load of other extras, such as a heap of extra general purpose registers, which makes up for the 64 bit code penalty. In an ideal world, your amd64 box would run a pure 64 bit kernel and a 64 bit int / 32 bit pointer userland, and still have access to the extra registers. Unfortunately, amd64 can't do this (unlike, say, MIPS). Note that people who have only read the marketing material and who don't realise what various non-x86 archs get up to will tell you that what I just said was wrong and that "64 bit is just plain faster". It's not, and things are not as simple as the marketroids would like you to believe, but because of limitations in amd64 you're still better going for 64 bit userland and kernel. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm pgp6UGgQbiAZQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
On 05/19/05 23:41, Bob Sanders wrote: On Thu, 19 May 2005 22:15:55 -0400 Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: As I await my income-tax refund, I'm drooling over a couple of machines on a website that allows you to build to your own specs. One is an Intel P4 CPU 505 2.66GHz/533FSB/1M and the other is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+/1600FSB/512K CPU. Spec'ed out otherwise identically, the AMD comes out slightly less expensive; it's not significant. Is there any real advantage to be had with an Athlon 64? Does Gentoo do anything with the extra 64 bits? Gentoo runs in full 64-bit mode on the AMD64. Downside is some problems with binary only packages like Shockwave Flash. It works fine in 32-bit environements, like Opera on an AMD64, but no with Firefox or Mozilla. Also, if you have to have OpenOffice, it must be the binary version as the soucre still doesn't compile cleanly at 64-bits. If you play games, Cedega doesn't work very well, but UT2004 works fine in 64-bit mode, though the ATI 9250 pretty much sucks playing at anything over 800x600,. and generally kind of sucks there as well. An Nvidia 5200 works fine. Also, consider that the AMD64 will be cooler than the P4 - it runs around 65 W, while the P4 is around 85 W. Also, I have a choice between a 64 meg ATI Radeon 7000 and a 128 meg Radeon 9250, at the same price. I have a Radeon 7000 working on an older machine right now. Are there any Gentoo issues with drivers for the 9250? Only that neither the Radeon Xorg driver nor the ATI driver support 16x10 - 1600x1024. They do fine at 4x3 - 1280x1024 and 16x9 - 1280x768, with the 9250. Well, they did, before the 9250 started dieing. Replaced it with an nVidia card, that does do 16x10 and all the rest. 1280x1024 is 5:4, 1280x960 is 4:3... This reply brought to you by Gentoo on an AMD64 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] rsanders $ uname -av Linux chi 2.6.11-gentoo-r3 #2 Thu May 12 21:24:58 PDT 2005 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux Bob -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
On Fri, 20 May 2005, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > Note that people who have only read the marketing material and who > don't realise what various non-x86 archs get up I know you're very "into" alternate archs especially MIPS and SPARC (which is great BTW). So is it true that Niagara SPARCs will have EIGHT cores??? -- Aj. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
Ciaran, >such as a heap of extra general purpose registers, which makes up for >the 64 bit code penalty Only if the compiler's register allocator makes use of them, which gcc does. >In an ideal world, your amd64 box would run a pure 64 bit kernel and a >64 bit int / 32 bit pointer userland, and still have access to the >extra registers. Unfortunately, amd64 can't do this (unlike, say, >MIPS). I've been spending a lot of time in asm on my AMD64 and I _know_ that the AMD64 ABI specifies 32 bit integers regardless of the operating mode. >what I just said was wrong and that "64 bit is just plain faster". To reiterate, Ciaran is right and the marketing droids are wrong. >but because of limitations in amd64 you're still better going >for 64 bit userland and kernel. There are instructions that will flip the AMD64 back and forth between 32/64 bit modes. You can't push anything except a 64bit value onto the stack while in 64bit mode and in 32bit mode you can push 8/16/32 bit values and various other similar issues. Now the OS can set up for 32bit mode prior to executing a program but as you and many others have pointed out in this list the real problem is that portage does not yet keep (and distinguish between) copies of both 32 & 64 bit libraries in the same tree. That is why OpenOffice.Org, Flash, etc. are precompiled and linked binaries and they still run with a 64 bit kernel. I got an AMD64 because I wanted to explore these issues. If they scare off the original poster then he should at least compare a regular Athalon to a Pentium and then go with whatever 32bit version he decides. Cheers, -- Tres -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Questions about supported hardware for Gentoo.
On Fri, 20 May 2005 11:28:46 -0400 (EDT) "A. Khattri" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | On Fri, 20 May 2005, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: | > Note that people who have only read the marketing material and who | > don't realise what various non-x86 archs get up | | I know you're very "into" alternate archs especially MIPS and SPARC | (which is great BTW). So is it true that Niagara SPARCs will have | EIGHT cores??? Oh, maybe at some time in the distant future if Sun don't get bought out before they get around to it. Remember that the v9 instruction set is a hell of a lot smaller, cleaner and easier to work with than x86, so it's not necessarily as big a deal as one might think. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron) Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm pgpziqfQJi7Dy.pgp Description: PGP signature
