64bit Or 32bit, Again..

yea I know its another thread w/the same title.. but....


Really, is 64 bit a waste of time? Seems like alot of software just doesnt work. Qt4 designer crashes, Monodevelop crashes, cinelerra locks up (now seems to be running ok but I havent used it for a long duration of time). Its not my memory it checks out fine.


If I were to wipe out 64bit and install 32 bit would I notice any slowdown? Any drawback to running 32 bit ?

I guess I shouldnt have bought a core2duo system and stuck w/a 32bit processor.

I'm a 32-bit user and my hardware is 32-bit. IMHO if I were to get 64-bit hardware, I probably would install 64-bit openSUSE, for two reasons:
a. I want to learn more about 64-bit, and
b. I have been told that video processing applications (rendering and such) work faster under 64-bit.

However if I found item-b was not the case, and if I found instability in my main applications (under 64-bit), I would go back to 32-bit.

Of course this is speculation on my part, and the opinion of those who use 64-bit means a heck of a lot more.

64 bit processors are backward compatible with x32 bit software, so you have a choice and in most cases a x64 CPU will outperform a x32 CPU with a x32 OS and apps. 32 bit has been around alot longer than 64 so has had more time to workout the bugz but 32 is not without its own problems.

I dual boot Win XP x64 and Suse 10.3 x64 not only because I like new and shiny but I also enjoy the challenge of getting cutting edge tech to work how I want it.

But if you just want stuff to work by all means go back to x32 it has had more development time.

i have a amd athlon 64... installed opensuse 10.1 then 10.2 and now 10.3 64 bits... never had a problem... and OLDCPU is totally right... my 3d applications work faster... i use blender a lot and when i render models to get 3d images is faster than in my laptop which is a core duo... newer than the amd... theres some tricks about java in firefox and flash but everything solvable... a little more work and research to do but thats why we use linux right?...

a little more work and research to do but thats why we use linux right?...
[/b]

my gripe is that the prepackaged stuff is what is not working for me. I will get monodevelop and compile it myself to see if that solves the problem. If so then that'll work for me. I'm assuming I can compile cinelerra myself since it is already installed so all the dependencies should be there, correct?

Really, is 64 bit a waste of time? Seems like alot of software just doesnt work.... I guess I shouldnt have bought a core2duo system and stuck w/a 32bit processor.[/b]

This sounded like a Deja vue to me. Remember the old time when i80386 just came out when I bunch of idiots still wanted to run their i80386 with a Win3.1 while some of us were already running Linux 32-bit on the same platform? I kept hearing those idiots saying why fix it if it ain't broken. Anyway, a friend of mine managed to convince some professors to ditch their Win3.1 for Linux when he showed them a presentation of an i80386 running a simple neuralnet program on the same computer with different OSes like Linux and Win3.1. First, he loaded the Win3.1 OS and asked them to time the compilation using Borland Turbo C compiler and execution of an error back propagation neuralnet program to simulate an X-OR. Then, he loaded Linux and did the same thing. It took the Win3.1 program about 33 minutes to converge from the simulation while its Linux counterpart program needed about 1:13 minutes to converge. All audiences who were in that presentation were surprised to find out how much slower an i80386 was with a 16-bit Win3.1 OS compared to a 32-bit Linux OS. One professor made an interesting comment saying that having a 16-bit Win3.1 OS running on a 32-bit platform computer (i80386) is like having a Ferrari sport car running on a low octant fuel. And the best part of this presentation was more than 75% audiences got convinced and migrated to Linux. You have to remember one thing that these professors were used to a nice Windows GUI OS, let alone the Microsoft Word processor software. They really had to learn LaTEX from scratch on their i80386 computers running on a Linux OS to process their text files for publications and that was pretty ugly without a GUI word processor. However, they all were very thankful because not only they were able to publish their publications with nicer fonts a LaTEX could offer, but also be able to harness the maximum power their i80386 computers could offer with no more worries on those pesky trojan horse and/or computer virus coming from e-mails attacking their i80386 computer when running on a Win3.1 OS.

AFAIC, problems like you mentioned in your post really don't deter myself to migrate to a 64-bit platform because they will eventually be fixed with new releases of software and it will only cost our time to download new upgrades/releases. Hecks, a lot of us have wasted our time posting on this and/or other forums, so downloading new upgrades should not really be considered a waste, AFAIC. Of course, YMMV.

I'm assuming I can compile cinelerra myself since it is already installed so all the dependencies should be there, correct?[/b]

My experience is cinelerra can be a real bear to compile. Difficult is the operative word.

If I were to wipe out 64bit and install 32 bit would I notice any slowdown? Any drawback to running 32 bit ?[/b]

It'd probably perform about the same. Unlike AMD's processors, Intel's Core 2 hardly gains any performance at all from 64-bit processing. The primary benefit is the ability to address more memory. It looks like Linux starts to benefit from the increased address space of 64-bit processing once you move above 1GB of RAM:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450

Of course, the performance differences between 32-bit and 64-bit addressing will be pretty small all the way up to 4GB, but above there it should really start to make a difference (note: at 4GB of RAM, your programs on a 32-bit machine won't be able to see all 4GB. In Linux, they'll see 3GB each, in Windows 2GB each).

For myself, I've been using 64-bit linux for, well, it must be about three years now. Early-on they had some issues that were relatively easily resolved by using 32-bit versions for some programs (such as web browsers). Bugs crop up here and there, but mostly in beta versions. So I don't see any good reason to not stay 64-bit, particularly as we should all be moving to 4GB and above within the next couple of years (I myself would like to get an 8GB quad-core setup running within the year...).

I guess I shouldnt have bought a core2duo system and stuck w/a 32bit processor.[/b]

As others have mentioned, the 64-bit processors are still significantly faster than their 32-bit counterparts, even in 32-bit processes.

I have been running 64 bit myself without to many problems.
The 64 bit ver.I have been running is 10.2. I'm thinking of installing 10.3 32bit on a twin HD.
Just to do a comparison between the 2.
What is the maximum amount of ram Linux can use right now. 4Gig?

No, the 32-bit CPU has instructions that allow a virtual space > 4G, but you need a differently compiled kernel. In the past distros SUSE provided some kernels with names like 64GB or bigsmp. But nowadays with the stock kernel, yes, it's limited to 4GB. In fact the effective RAM available will be < 4G due to remapping of some RAM by the hardware above the 4G line.

The 64-bit CPU has a much larger memory space of course. Not 2^64 due to chip limitations, but much larger that most people care.