Fedora Linux Is Looking For Those Still Using 32-bit AMD CPUs

[mmstick]

Finding someone with an AMD processor that isn't 64-bit is practically impossible. AMD stopped making 32-bit CPUs since the day they released the Athlon 64. Have a 32-bit AMD CPU? It's probably too ancient to run a modern Linux desktop anyway. There's zero reason to use 32-bit software when you have a 64-bit processor.

[Gusar]

Have a 32-bit AMD CPU? It's probably too ancient to run a modern Linux desktop anyway.

The AthlonXP 3000+ I have is paired with a Geforce 4MX. Probably not good enough for Gnome, but KDE with its Opengl 1.x mode should work well. I run LXDE on the machine.

[Shimon]

Yeah, I've still got a working Athlon XP 3000+ (@2GHz) with 2 GB of memory and FX5200 - with new kernel features like ZRAM and nvidia binary drivers it's flying, especially in my favourite WindowMaker.

However, power consumption hasn't got better over the years

[chithanh]

mmstick
Actually in the early days, AMD made some Socket 754 K8 CPUs with the 64-bit part disabled for HP (called Athlon XP-M). It was rumoured that this had something to do with an agreement between Intel and HP to only sell 64-bit processors using the Itanium architecture.

[duby229]

I still remembering getting into stupid conversations where intelligent people argued that 1 ghz clock is fast enough for any task forever. I suppose if you can find a newer GPU with a AGP or PCI buss it should be able to run modern desktops. I dont think I would want to run such a slow CPU, but I'm sure it could work for some people.

[Mike Frett]

I've got an Athlon XP mobo and cpu boxed up but it has no ram. It works though. I have some older Slot A CPUs also. Actually, I have another Athlon XP complete PC that the Insurance salesman gave me a few years ago but these older computers don't work so well with modern Linux distros if the ram is below 1GB. People around here give me their "junk" computers, I dunno why. Also have a working E-Machines Pentium III PC sitting right here on the floor that I never bothered with.

[droidhacker]

You know, I think I still have a 32 bit AMD laptop. It'll be up north though with a cooked hard disk on a shelf at the back of the garage with mice and rats running across it all day every day.

Looks like they got testers though, and it works. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipe...er/214692.html

[cb88]

One solution would be to run a 64bit kernel with 32bit userland ... on low ram machines. It's trivial on source compiled distros.

[kobblestown]

I still use 32 bit images. I have an old pentium 4 with i Gb of ram. It is x64 but with 1 Gb of ram 32 bit S.O is the best option. Windows sucks for such a limited RAM but linux still rocks.

Well, the P4 is a special story with respect to x64. AFAIR, it didn't gain much from it because it was retrofitted to an existing 32-bit microarchitecture. For any modern chip I would suggest running x64 even with 1GB RAM. The overhead of x64 on Linux is quite small. Also, because of the way Linux maps physical memory in the virtual address space of each process, it can not fit the entire 1GB in the kernel area (>3GB) )with the default 3/1 split. So it has to do some juggling to access all memory. I don't know what's the actual overhead of that, but the gains from the increased number of registers are nothing to sneeze at.

In any case, as cb88 suggests, one can run 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userland. I guess x32 is also an option for the adventurous. I don't know if any distro supports it. But we are getting off-topic.

[Veto]

Not AMD but...

Writing this from a Dell D420 with a Core Duo U2500 @ 1.2 GHz happily running Ubuntu 32 bit :-)

The computer was born with Windows Vista and basically unusable until "upgraded" to Windows XP. When I inherited it from my wife, I changed its slow 1.8" HDD to an SDD and installed Ubuntu - that was a major upgrade.