[arch-general] [Fwd: [arch-announce] Dropping i686 support]

[Sergey Manucharian]

Right now personally I use i686 Arch installed in Thinkpad R61,
although, of course, I can use x86_64 . The reason is simple - 2 or 3
years ago I tried x86_64 (with AMD box), but found no performance
improvement. More over, e.g. videoencoding with mencoder was SLOWER
than under i686. I've found that AMD suggests to use their math
libraries to get the maximum performance, but do people do that? I'm
not sure...

Just an opinion...

Cheers,
Sergey

On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:37:22 +0200
RedShift <redshift at pandora.be> wrote:

> Rafa Grimán wrote:
> > 
> > For x86 based models, I guess we'll have to switch for the time
> > being to another distro, which IMHO isn't too much of an issue.
> > Sooner or later we'll have to switch over to x86-64 based systems
> > since x86 is used on old hardware: hard to get replacements,
> > doesn't scale, less performance, ...
> > 
> 
> x86_64 is just x86 with more registers with 64 bit address space
> instead of 32 bit. Architecturally there is not much difference so
> all the shortcomings of x86 still exist on x86_64. Unfortunately.
>