On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 5:45 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 09:25:45AM -0800, John Reiser wrote:
> On 01/24/2011 07:43 AM, drago01 wrote:
> > It is the only 32bit only CPU still being sold,
>
> There are plenty of machines with 32-bit only CPUs (such as early Celeron,
> Pentium socket 478, even some Core Duos [Apple Mini]) which run Fedora very well.
> Many are less than 5 years old. In the US, that means the depreciation rules
> of tax law strongly encourage their continued use.
There's even plenty "still being sold". How about VIA, itx, and tons
of other small/embedded stuff that isn't Atom.
Yes, like the 2 million XO-1s using geode processors (that with the
move to i686 it was decided (no idea if it was board or FESCo) the
XO-1 was something they wanted to support in Fedora, and the other
millions of XO-1.5s that will be deployed in the coming year or two
which run on VIA processors.
*However* optimizing for 32 bit surely has to be a waste of effort
these days. People who want performance should be using 64 bit
machines. For everyone else it's good enough that Fedora can still be
used. Optimizing for Atom alone is justified because Netbooks are
used interactively. So I think the Fedora flags are just right in
this case.
That's fine IMO as long as it still runs reasonably on the other 32
bit platforms. Also all the nettop 1st gen atom processors are x86-64
and the 2nd gen atom netbook/nettop (N4xx/N5xx/D5xx) processors are
x86-64 now too [1]. So in most cases its just first gen netbooks plus
the devices based on z series, the later having issues anyway as they
don't have an open and supported driver for their GPU.
Peter
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_processor#History