Comment Re:the usual BS about 64-bit (Score 2, Interesting) 770
Actually, i386->amd64 is an improvement. While you do loose performance going from 32->64 memory addresses (and thus using more cache), you gain more general use registers, which i386 is *greatly* starved (you basically have four that you know are always available, and the a bunch more that may or may not be available for general usage if you know what features the processor supports, and you hand-write ASM, or tune your compiler). Hence the performance increases going from i386->amd64, but no on other 32 to 64 migrations involving the same architecture base set (i.e., sparc32->sparc64 or powerpc32->powerpc64).