Looking over the results 64-bit Ubuntu was able to provide a strong advantage in the GCC benchmarks with both LAME and the Linux 2.6.19 kernel compilation. However, a slight advantage had remained with both Unreal Tournament 2004 and the LAME encoding tests in a 32-bit environment. Outside of the i386 and x86_64 analysis, it is also worth noting that at this time there are no real speed increases between Edgy Eft and Feisty Fawn; however, this was only the first Alpha (Herd) release of many to come before the April 2007 release of Ubuntu 7.04.

So you just bought and assembled a brand-new AMD64 workstation. The only decision that remains is whether to install a 64-bit Linux distribution, or stick with comfortable, tried-and-true IA-32. If you are seeking an easy answer to that question, I can't help you. Running 64-bit Linux has its pros and cons. Unfortunately, a lot of the cons are out of your hands -- but they're not really Linux's fault, either.

The Debian project confirms December 2006 as the date for the next release of its distribution which will be named Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch'. This will be the first official release to include the AMD64 architecture. The distribution will be released synchronously for 11 architectures in total.

At this stage, the upcoming release will ship with Linux 2.6.17 as its default kernel. This kernel will be used across all architectures and on the installer. A later version may be selected during a review in October.

New features of this release include the GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 as default compiler. X.Org will replace XFree86 as implementation of the X Window System X11. Secure APT will add extra security by easily supporting strong cryptography and digital signatures to validate downloaded packages.