Amd64 has arrived at my house!! Woot!

[CornedBee]

I still can buy a different one. I just don't feel very comfortable with messing with the system. I'm kinda dependent on this system, seeing as the keyboard on the laptop is broken and my old PC is stuck in the middle of a Gentoo installation.

[Waldo2k2]

for reference: never ever ever ever ever mess with the heatsink while the board is fastened inside your case. Often times heatsinks are difficult to install/remove easily, you usually have to push on that stupid tab hard enough to break it just to get it to snap into/out of place. So, remove the board first and lay it on a flat surface, being screwed into the case gives it very little support under the processor and there's a good chance of damaging the board by pressing on it so hard.

[CornedBee]

Thanks. That's one thing I was never planning to do. But at least those new heatsinks are far easier to install than those on the first Socket As.

[jrahhali]

Do you (general) think it is worth it to buy a 64 bit processor right now?

[Waldo2k2]

definitely.

there's a huge performance increase in the use of the hyper transport bus (6.4gb/s). Even though many current apps (for windows anyway) aren't designed to run 64 bit, the processor still takes half the time to cruch numbers. If you had a 64 bit address to parse on a 32-bit processor, it would take 2 cycles, on a 64 bit, only one. So on any number >32 bit it takes half the time to process it. And I've compared the performance of a athlon xp 3200 to a 64 3200 and it's a noticable difference.

[jrahhali]

>>hyper transport bus (6.4gb/s).
I've looked it up, and i found out that it's a Point-to-Point bus with [at least] two unidirectional links. point to point to/from what?

Also i was reading some documentation of the memory controller of the amd64+ 3500 cpu.

Up to four unbuffered DIMMs in a 128-bit configuration, or up to two unbuffered DIMMs in a 64-bit configuration

What does sthe 128/64-bit configuration mean?

[Waldo2k2]

>>to/from what?

from everything else to the front side bus to the processor.

>>128/64 bit

can't remember the exact definition, but it has to do with how the chip is configured, how many bytes in a bank and how many banks on a chip and how those banks are interfaced, either 64 bits at a time or 128 bits at a time.