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Atom 330 - 32 or 64 bit

Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 9:40 am
by nuclear216
Hi Guys!

I have an atom 330 board which I am gonna put to good use with Amahi, it will serve as backup server, Ampache, and Torrentflux.

Given the info on this page: http://popolon.org/gblog2/atom330-benchmark and various other thread I've read
it seems like 64 bit is better for "floats", 32 bit mode is better for "integer computation", I have no idea what this mean so, please, can anyone explain this to me? given my use what version of Fedora should I install, 32-bit or 64-bit??

Re: Atom 330 - 32 or 64 bit

Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 12:34 pm
by moredruid
Wikipedia to the rescue!

Floating point is faster and more flexible at the expense of precision. Due to error checking and error correction you won't really notice the difference unless you're computing datasets that _MUST_ be exact (think medical applications, computing the load of a bridge that must be built, that kind of stuff).

Just go with whatever you feel most comfortable with. I don't think you'll notice a difference (perhaps a little in speed and handling of large files (8GB+) or very large memory configurations (16GB+ RAM) on 64bit).

Re: Atom 330 - 32 or 64 bit

Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2009 8:32 am
by nuclear216
I should have posed the question in a different manner:

LAMP stack + some operation on music and video file + eventually some video conversion

do they make more "floating" or "integer"?

IF the question doesn't make sense (which might very well be given myself :shock: ), than I need to crunch more about this to get to the bottom of it.

Re: Atom 330 - 32 or 64 bit

Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2009 2:21 pm
by cpg
if you are doing video conversion, that is the more cpu intensive app that you may want to look into. if you know what library you are using, that will tell if it's using integer or float.

it probably uses integer manipulations.

anyway, as moredruid explains, there probably is not a lot of noticeable difference otherwise.

go with 64 bits.

Re: Atom 330 - 32 or 64 bit

Posted: Fri Dec 25, 2009 7:10 pm
by Icey
Good to know :)
Also with only 2Gb of ram?

Would 64-bit improve networking speeds? or just big file handling?

grtz

Re: Atom 330 - 32 or 64 bit

Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 12:48 pm
by moredruid
nope
64bit is basically a measure for memory addressing.

read it all here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit