[PlanetCCRMA] New PC - Athlon 64

D. R. Evans doc.evans@gmail.com
Sat Dec 3 07:07:01 2005


Jan Depner said the following at 2005-12-02 19:56 :

>My poor old Athlon XP 1700+ is dying from heat prostration so I'm
>planning on asking the ball and chain if I can get a new toy.  The one
>that looks most promising to me is a single processor Athlon 64 3700+
>system.  Has anyone played much with the Athlon 64's?  If so, do I need
>to load the 32 bit version of the OS to keep it working with Planet
>CCRMA or can I load the 64 bit version?  I have pretty simple needs here
>- JACK, Ardour, JAMin, LADSPA, Audacity, XMMS, Xine...  Any advice would
>be greatly appreciated.  TIA.
>
>  
>
Following the advice of others, I have loaded the 32-bit version of FC3 
on to the 64-bit system I will be using for audio.

FWIW, I have another machine here that is an Athlon 64X2, on which I am 
running Mandriva 2006.0, and I find that quite a few apps are unstable 
on it. The 64-bit Audacity that ships with Mandriva 2006.0, for example, 
is utterly unusable. I don't know whether this is because it it not 
64-bit safe and Mandriva didn't know that, or whether it has threading 
bugs that only become obvious when you put the executable on a dual-core 
CPU.  In any case, the advice to load stock 32-bit FC3 on an audio 
machine seems quite wise, even though it's giving up some of the raw 
power of the hardware.

  Doc Evans