T61 architecture

[Pete Zaitcev]

On Fri, 9 Nov 2007 23:15:24 +0200, "Peter Lauri" <peterlauri at gmail.com> wrote:

> But what would the benefit of installing x86_64 be? Pros vs cons?

x86_64 is marginally faster despite the bigger cache footprint because
it adds registers, so if you do something like biochemistry or mathlab
on your lappy, it helps. It's more about the number of registers than
their size. Also, at some loads with some peripherals, eliminating highmem
gives a boost. Not only there's no copying, but also the single-zone
VM in Linux performs much better than dual-zone for many loads. You
can see it when using an external USB disk.

So that's the rule of thumb. On a plain office box with less than
960MB there's probably no sense in it.

-- Pete