[plug] Linux hardware compatibility

[Michael Collard]

On Sat, 2005-01-29 at 12:44 +0800, Craig Foster wrote:


> While I don't want to start the whole AMD Vs Intel thing either, Intel
> aren't king of the (technical) hill anymore.
> Besides, Intel used to make a big thing about there being no 64-bit software
> out there, but the new Prescotts have EM64T built in as well now :P

That version of EM64T they 'stole' isn't even as complete as AMD's
64-bit implementation. I recall reading a comparison between a 64bit
Xeon and a Athlon64 (the one they later changed to a Opteron vs Xeon64
review). The A64/Opteron had more instructions or registers than Intel's
CPUs and completely outperformed the Xeon64 on 64 bit applications.

Oops, I just started the Intel vs AMD thing ;)


> If you do go AMD, the only real choice is a Nforce 3 or 4 motherboard, just
> for reliability. Linux support is there for the nforce chipsets, but I don't
> think it specifically supports NCQ SATA commands yet.

I got to test a K8T800 and a Nforce3 board for my A64. The Via chipset
was a clear winner for me because of lack of support for the NForce3
chipset (this was back in April). This may not be the same now, but then
as now, Linux fully supports my K8T800 and other peripherals (inc SATA)
on the board.

> Three friends have all bought PCs like this and two are running Fedora Core
> 3, and the other is running SuSE 9.2 (both which support AMD_x64 processors)

For x86_64, there are a few things you need to consider if its a desktop
machine. 32 bit compatibility is the major hurdle. I use (and compile)
32bit versions of MPlayer, wine (obviously), flash and Ogre3D (a 3D
engine). Some distributions don't gracefully handle 32/64 bit packages
being installed together. Gentoo for example, forget 32 bit
compatibility, its too much work. I don't know about Debian's 64 bit
port now, but the last time I looked at it, was kinda new and young.
Suse is another good choice but looking at package availability (for
x86_64), Mandrake seemed most x86_64 ready, and thats the one I went
with.

Cheers
Michael Collard