The Fedora project <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-i686-Non-Blocking> has noticed that very few of its users seem to be on 32-bit systems nowadays. This was shown by a kernel bug that went undetected for two months, that prevented 32-bit x86 systems from even booting. Time to relegate 32-bit machines to the junk pile?
On Thu, Aug 06, 2015 at 02:49:34PM +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
The Fedora project <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-i686-Non-Blocking> has noticed that very few of its users seem to be on 32-bit systems nowadays. This was shown by a kernel bug that went undetected for two months, that prevented 32-bit x86 systems from even booting.
Time to relegate 32-bit machines to the junk pile?
Debian popcon (http://popcon.debian.org/) reports 50167 i386 users and 123570 amd64 users. While amd64 has well surpassed i386, i386 almost has two orders of magnitude more users than the next architecture (armel at 786 users), thus i386 (32-bit x86) is still well used. Personally I can't understand why anyone would want to use a 32-bit system for any serious computing having been programming on 64-bit systems for 17 years. Cheers Michael.
On Thu, 6 Aug 2015 14:55:43 +1200, Michael Cree wrote:
Personally I can't understand why anyone would want to use a 32-bit system for any serious computing having been programming on 64-bit systems for 17 years.
Call me a sentimentalist, but I can remember what a breath of fresh air it was to move from 16-bit to 32-bit systems, so I still have some fondness for them. :) 32 bits made whole categories of software practicable which were simply too hard to do in 16 bits. For example, writing code in C or Pascal, as opposed to assembler, BASIC or FORTH. Do we have new categories of software which are not practicable in 32 bits, but are in 64? Otherwise, it’s simply a matter of being able to cope with a lot more data at once. I don’t think the code of any program has come close to 4GiB.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Michael Cree