[StringEpsilon]

All modern x86* CPUs are 64bit anyway and if this move means maintainers are freed up a bit, then I think it's worthwhile for the distro as a whole.

Arch isn't really meant to be that one distro you can stick on a PC from the early nineties anyway. There are much more suitable distros for legacy hardware.

And about the downsides of 64bit: I think the vastly improved address space offsets the improved memory use by orders of magnitues. My Desktop has 8 times as much useable RAM as it could have with 32bit - but 32bit datatypes are only double in size.

[Koshkin]

> the early nineties

64-bit computers started gaining popularity in the consumer market only, what, 5 years ago?

[mastax]

What do you mean gaining popularity?

Athlon 64 came out in 2003, Pentium 4F in 2005. I'll concede that 32-bit Atoms were reasonably popular in certain market segments, but hasn't generally every consumer computer been 64-bit for over 10 years?

[Koshkin]

Sure, but the point has nothing todo with the availabilty or popularity of 64-bit CPUs. Rather, it has to do with the amount of memory deemed necessary in a computer. As far as I remember, Windows Vista, which was released into the wild just about 10 years ago, was predominantly 32-bit, 64-bit intalls, just like with XP, being more of a curiosity. Few consumer devices had more than 2GB of RAM back then.

[wolrah]

The Athlon 64 was released in September 2003, the Prescott Pentium 4 in February 2004, and the iMac G5 in August 2004.

Desktop CPUs have been basically guaranteed to be 64 bit since 2005.

The Pentium 3 derived Pentium M and Core Solo/Duo delayed wide mobile adoption of 64 bit until Core 2 came around in July 2006. I'd guess by 2007 you could probably safely assume 64 bit across all but the cheapest laptops as well.

tl;dr: Aside from a few Atom-powered netbooks 64 bit has been standard in anything resembling a normal computer for around a decade.