Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Rob <europa100@×××××××.net>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] i386 vs amd64
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 17:06:40
Message-Id: 43591F11.9000300@comcast.net
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] i386 vs amd64 by Scott Tiret
1 Scott Tiret wrote:
2 > On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 20:07 -0400, Sean wrote:
3 >
4 >>I have a dual opteron here and I am thinking of putting Gentoo on it. I
5 >>am trying to decide to go with either the amd64 or i386 version.
6 >>So I am asking some Gentoo amd64 users, are you happy with the version
7 >>or would you have gained more with i386?
8 >>Do most applications work on amd64 or are there some important ones missing?
9 >
10 >
11 > I have been running an x86_64 (amd64) system for a few months now. The
12 > only thing I have been missing is a 64bit version of Macromedia
13 > Shockwave plugin. Apparently, there is no 64bit version for this
14 > proprietary software.
15 >
16 > Everything else is fine. I have all I need on my desktop. x86_64
17 > version of Openoffice-bin (rc3) takes a long time to open, but is
18 > promising.
19 >
20 > Good luck,
21 >
22 I thought the email might be a good place to ask for some ideas:
23
24 I don't want to start a 64bit vs 32 bit war, or a Windows versus *nix
25 war, but it has been my experience so far that the fastest benchmarks
26 for a highly computation intensive program written in Numeric Python
27 came on my 3.5Ghz P4 laptop with hyperthreading- on Windows. Also,
28 running the same program on an AMD Opteron gave me a slower speed no
29 matter what OS I was using. I performed the experiments when the
30 Opteron was first introduced. I paid a high price for the fastest chip
31 I could find- I don't remember the exact speed. I haven't tried the
32 test lately though. Maybe it has gotten much better.
33
34 Do not ask me why it happened, I have no idea. But even now, Windows+P4
35 has consistently been 3x faster in execution time than any Python on 32
36 bit *nix systems. The specific program is a Numeric Python port of the
37 NEC2 EM Simulator program which calculates the Norton-Summerfield ground
38 coefficients under an antenna. It makes much use of Complex-64
39 variables. I ported it from FORTRAN so I could more easily see how the
40 program worked.
41
42 I am baffled by the behavior. The only thing I can figure might be
43 occuring would be that the *nix 64 bit toolchains are much younger than
44 the 32 bit ones. But as the 32 bit Numeric Python on Windows is still
45 3x faster than the *nix equivalents, I have asked Activestate, the
46 Windows Python provider, if they do anything special when compiling the
47 code and they say no. I think they said that they use some ordinary MS
48 comiler.
49
50 Any ideas would help me to put to rest the problem. I say it is a
51 problem as I really don't want to boot into Windows XP to run scientific
52 programs in Numeric Python.
53
54 Thanks,
55
56 Rob.
57 --
58 gentoo-user@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] i386 vs amd64 Richard Fish <bigfish@××××××××××.org>