On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:
On 2014-10-30 19:04, Timothy Butterworth wrote:
On 10/29/2014 04:50 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
What scares me is that devs want to pull the plug on 32 bits.
+1 I personally would not mind seeing some old architectures dropped say
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 7:02 PM, Anton Aylward <> wrote: like everything below Pentium 4 or Intel Core II Duo as a start then optimizing the 32 bit kernel for the newer processors but at least it is no longer optimized for i386 anymore.
I also would like the i386 target be dropped and switched to the i686 target instead.
But.
There are some AMD processors that do not support all the instructions of the P-IV (MMS?) and break down. There have been recent reports about that.
I have seen other distro's drop i386. It should be possible to work with AMD to produce a AMD 32 bit kernel build and bump the intel build up to i686.
Then I think that there are some modern low powered CPUs that are 32 bit, being sold in some laptops recently. I saw a post not long ago about one, but we did not clarify fully if it was really 32 bit CPU or if it had some other limitation instead. Like a 32 bit memory path :-? There were doubts, but the OP did not comment back.
I have an Intel tablet of unknown (to me) CPU. Maybe it is 32 bit, would not surprise me.
Intel Atom CPU's are 32 bit but they have been working on a 64 bit. The Intel Atom processors do support MMS, SSE1-2/3.
In virtualization, it aparently makes sense to provide virtual 32 bit machines instead of 64, even if the host hardware is 64 bit. Apparently they use less resources. But this could use a way more modern variant that the P-IV.
32 bit is only useful in a VM if you are providing the guest 2GB of RAM or less. 64 bit on 2GB or less of RAM is less efficient due to the larger RAM addressing scheme wasting space.
32 bit will eventually go away, I do not know why anyone would want to keep using a P4 with 1GB of Ram when they could upgrade to a much better system at a very low cost like a Core II Duo for example.
Because we already have the hardware and it costs money to replace it!
I have an old IBM Aptiva P1 MMX in the basement with the 17 inch CRT that was purchased with it. It has 1 USB 1.1 port and I think about 512MB of RAM. My $300 ASUS Notebook I am typing on has 4GB of RAM and a Celeron 1.5 GHZ Dual Core. Just because I have the old Aptiva and it does still work does not mean I actually want to use it for anything It is not a Core II Duo 1.8GHZ with 4GB of RAM after all. I know a P4 can still run a modern GNU/Linux distro decently well. I installed some old P4 with openSUSE 12.x versions about two years ago, they were not fast in any way and I had to disable all KDE KWin desktop effects to make them more usable but they did work alright after tweaking them.
Old computers do not need to be land fill they can be recycled for the valuable metals they contain.
Oh, yes. In some village in China or Africa, where people wearing paper masks on mouth for /protection/ and nose burn the plastics in open fires, close to a river, to get the metal, and similar low tech and dangerous /recycling/ technologies.
I was planning to tear apart the Aptiva and take it into the local recycling, obviously taking the tiny parts off of the mother board would be challenging with out a inexpensive soldering iron. Aside from the tin case there is copper in the fans, power supply, old CRT. I do agree that a mechanized system is needed and should be created to rapidly remove and collect all the motherboard components and break them down in a safer way but I guess the tiny amount of gold located in the CPU/GPU currently is not tempting enough at current market price. I also do not know of any use for cooked Silicon other than land fill it can not be ground to dust and reused currently. I am not interested in the money from recycling it just clearing out space as I have other old systems and junk stacking up down there also.
It is documented.
Please! :-(
-- Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)
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