...and all for what? To have a smaller address range and thus smaller pointers, to save on memory usage and memory bandwidth … by the time x32 will be ready, I’d be ready to bet that neither concerns will be that important — heck I don’t have a single computer with less than 8GB of RAM, right now!It might be more interesting to know why is x32 so important for enough people to work on it; to me, it seems like the main reason is that it saves a lot of memory on C++ programs, simply because every class and every object has so many pointers (functions, virtual functions and so on so forth), that the change from 32 to 64 bit has been a hit big enough. Given that there is so much software still written in C++ (I’m unconvinced as to why to be honest), it’s likely that there is enough interest in working on this to improve the performance.But at the end of the day, I’m really concerned that this might not be worth the effort: we’re calling unto us another big problem with this kind of multilib (considering we never really solved multilib for the “classic” amd64, and that Debian is still working hard to get their multiarch method out of the door), plus a number of software porting problems that will keep a lot of people busy for the next years. The efforts would probably be better directed at improving the current software and moving everything to pure 64-bit....
Imagine Facebook, why would they need PHP to run as a 64bit program? What would they lose if they’d run it under x32 ABI? What would they gain? Performance per server.So it might not matter for desktop users, it does matter if you’re actually running a server