[olug] Advice on a new rig

[Christopher Cashell]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 6:04 PM, Luke Dashjr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 November 2008 09:22:58 am Christopher Cashell wrote:
>> I'm confused about why you would jump to PowerPC or MIPS for 64bit support.
>> As much as I'm a fan of the PowerPC architecture, there is *nothing*
>> available in PowerPC or MIPS that can come anywhere close to modern x86-64
>> CPU's when taking into account price, performance, flexibility, and legacy
>> support.
>
> Then why is PowerPC the platform of choice for the Wii, XBox360, and PS3?
> I rarely run unmaintained software, and generally it should run fine in any
> emulator. To get any kind of 32-bit compatibility from x86_64, you need to
> depend on having a 32-bit OS installed anyway (minus a kernel). With PowerPC
> and MIPS, you can mix 32-bit and 64-bit apps a bit cleaner.

Because those platforms have *drastically* different requirements than
general purpose desktops and servers.  They are, for all intents and
purposes, embedded devices running custom written software that is
targeted to the specific hardware it runs on.  Both PowerPC and MIPS
are quite popular in the embedded market.  However, they're
essentially non-existent in the current desktop and server markets
(the only real exceptions being IBM AIX boxes, or aging PowerPC Macs).
 Unless you search ebay, you can't even buy one easily these days.

As for 32bit/64bit compatibility, needing to run 32 bit code on a
PowerPC or MIPS platform is generally going to be much less of a
consideration, because you're not going to find any software
(regardless of 32bit or 64bit) for it that isn't provided by your
distribution.  It's either included, or you're building from source
(or trying to, considering both are second-class platforms for most
developers).  Or you're screwed and out of luck.

With x86-64, you get the benefit of the distributions providing a
fully features environment capable of running 64bit apps natively, and
easily running 32bit apps, as well.  Considering that any third-party
applications that you might want to run are frequently only available
in 32bit x86, that's a rather useful bit.

Regardless of all this, the original poster specifically asked about a
"dual-boot rig for gaming", which completely rules out PowerPC and
MIPS, unless he wants to run his games on Windows NT 4 (probably not
the best choice for gaming at this point).

-- 
Christopher