[LAU] Bye Bye 32 bit

[IOhannes m zmölnig]

On 12/26/2017 09:34 PM, Will Godfrey wrote:
> It seems everyone is dropping support for 32 bit machines these days 
> - including a number of Linux distros.

so the rpi is finally going down the drain?
(or not so, just because Debian is conservative enough to not drop 32bit
archs?)

> 
> It makes me wonder how long it will be before single core machines go the same
> way. Has anyone seen any hint of that yet?


i'm having a hard time imagining an audio software system that cannot
run on multi-core systems with N==1.
(unless you setup artificial guards that will simply refuse to run if
they detect less than N>1 CPUs)

as others pointed out: 32bit vs 64bit is (from a distro perspective) are
(completely) different architectures. otoh, 1 core vs 2 cores vs 4 cores
vs 4069 cores is mainly an hardware extension (that is: the user can -
in theory - just add more CPUs to their existing hardware).

to contracdict myself: one can easily think of audio software that
(strictly) depends on CUDA (or other hardware acceleration), so they
would require multiple PUs (that's even worse than requiring multiple
cores).
or audio software that requires super computing powers with many-core
systems to do anything in a reasonable time (deep learning foo).
but i tihnk both these examples will stay niche products (even nichier
than your average linux software) in the foreseeable future, so
shouldn't concern you much :-)

otoh, i think one important development in the last years has been
virtualisation.
now running a couple of VMs on your 16 core laptop will quickly eat away
your CPU powers - and more so, if you allocate 8 cores to each VM.
so my personal VMs only get a single core allocated by default.
while running audio software in a VM might seem a but odd, i think that
any software not allowing such a use-case should die right away
(probably excepting virtualisation software),

gadsmr
IOhannes

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