Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 13, 2006 09:05 AM
> One advantage the AMD64 architecture has over other 64-bit processors (say SPARC) is the ability to run 32-bit programs (without resorting to emulation).
This is incorrect. SPARC has the ability to do this just fine. In fact, I'm posting this from a mixed SPARC64/SPARC32 box. My kernel is 64-bit, and I have both 32-bit and 64-bit userlands installed. The primary userland is 32-bit, but I do have a compiler for SPARC64 along with glibc and the C++ libraries in case I ever want to compile programs heavy on double-precision floating point arithmetic.
As a matter of fact, SPARC got this ability before AMD64 was even developed. The reason mixing 32-bit and 64-bit apps works as well as it does for AMD64 is because SPARC motivated the kernel to develop support for this kind of an environment.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Re:64-bit & 32-bit
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 13, 2006 09:05 AMThis is incorrect. SPARC has the ability to do this just fine. In fact, I'm posting this from a mixed SPARC64/SPARC32 box. My kernel is 64-bit, and I have both 32-bit and 64-bit userlands installed. The primary userland is 32-bit, but I do have a compiler for SPARC64 along with glibc and the C++ libraries in case I ever want to compile programs heavy on double-precision floating point arithmetic.
As a matter of fact, SPARC got this ability before AMD64 was even developed. The reason mixing 32-bit and 64-bit apps works as well as it does for AMD64 is because SPARC motivated the kernel to develop support for this kind of an environment.
#