[vox-tech] AMD Hammer, Athlon 64, Opteron...

[Mike Simons]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 10:37:37AM -0800, Bill Broadley wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 01:06:23PM -0500, Mike Simons wrote:
> > - Anyone played with a AMD Hammer system yet?
> 
> Er, yes, did you have a question about them?

  I was looking for a non-AMD performance opinion of them... 
compared to what's on the market now.

> > - Seen anything about a Debian port to to the architecture?
> 
> Not in particular, it should "just work" in 32 bit mode.  If you want
> full 64 bit mode (twice as many registers, 64 bit pointers, etc.), you
> have to use a 64 bit kernel which is out.  Check out:
> 	http://www.x86-64.org

  Hrmmmm... so in theory by changing only the kernel boot disks you'd
be able to install the i386 version, that interesting.

- Does the kernel/hardware support running a mix of 32/64 bit
  applications?

  I suspect that a amd64 native (i386-64 or whatever name) port of the 
debian packages will be made, (kinda like sparc32, sparc64).  So I'm
wondering if anyone has heard of a group working on that...

> I expect the x86-64 Opteron based servers to be announced sometime
> in April.  The Athlon 64 however has been rumored to have been delayed
> till Sept.

  Well as long as they don't continue to delay the release for a
multiple years like Intel did with the EPIC/ia64, AMD should be fine.

    Thanks,
      Mike