> I've been using Slackware for a long time and I'm wondering what your
> experiences have been with Slackware 10.x on AMD64. Do you still see a
> performance increase (the last Slackware system I used was a PIII
> laptop) even though the entire distribution isn't 64-bit?

AMD64 CPU's have other features that make them very fast, besides the 64bit
operations. The integrated memory controller, the hyper-transport system
etc.

And if you plan to add more than 2GB RAM, that's far easier on an AMD64 CPU
than on any 32-bit CPU, since the CPU can nativelly address all that
memory, and there's no need for complicated schemes like PAE etc.

So even if you run 32bit Slackware you'll see good performance improvements.

> Any 'gotchas' installing 10.x Slackware on AMD64?
> (ie. Nvidia/ATI drivers, etc.)

Until you run in 32bit mode there's no difference between an AMD64 cpu and
any other x86 CPU. Just make sure you have the latest BIOS on your
motherboard, that has coused a lot of problems to me.

> Or is it better to stick with Intel at this point?

I don't see a reason to pay the premium price for an Intel CPU.

--
damjan