x86_64 as Fedora's primary platform

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-09-27 at 15:12 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 13:48, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> The Fedora web resources (e.g. http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora )
> >> continue to promote i686 installs over x86_64, the result being that
> >> only a third of fedora users are on x86_64.
> >>
> >> When will the Fedora project begin recommending x86_64 as the
> >> preferred option on the relevant hardware?
> >
> > Well while many people have x86_64 capable hardware, 66% of the
> > systems have less than 2GB of ram installed on them. The gain of extra
> > registers is taken over by the amount of extra memory used. So I am
> > not sure pushing 64 bit will gain much beyond "why am I using so much
> > memory now?" messages.
> 
> I agree that systems which are very short on memory will be happier
> with i386 but I don't think 2GBytes is at all a reasonable cut-off.

My fairly typical (I imagine) F14 x86-64 desktop, running Evo, Firefox,
terminal, Xchat, Revelation, gedit, Rhythmbox is sitting at 2GB memory
usage right now, so it seems like a reasonable cut-off to me at least.

(900MB of that is Evo + Firefox, BTW).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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