Comment 95 for bug 587186

I don't think the 36.3 million people who bought Atom netbooks in 2009 think their system is "legacy" -- nor the 58 million expected to buy in 2010 (estimated May 2010: http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1656-2009+Netbook+Shipments+Pass+Expectations%2C+58+Million+Forecast+for+2010). All CPU vendors are still selling high and growing volumes of 32-bit-only x86 chips. Their users do care about performance, though the issue is much more about performance-per-watt than about raw performance. X86 chips without amd64 support are mostly used either in mobile applications where battery life matters, or in embedded boards with limited heat budgets (or fanless operation).

Given the higher penetration of Linux in netbooks (and OLPCs) than on desktops, there may well be more people running Fedora on x86 than on amd64. Indeed that's exactly what smolt shows: http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/static/stats/stats.html, with 69% on x86 and 30% on 64-bit, out of about 203,000 reporting hosts. (Smolt never runs on 1.5 million Fedora OLPCs that are Geode LX's. XO-1.5's will replace XO-1 sales this year; they use the Via C7-M ULV processor which is also only 32-bit x86 compatible, and all of them will run Fedora.)

Unfortunately the web and repo stats aren't broken out by architecture: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics . Perhaps this page can be improved to tell us how many accesses are happening to x86 versus x64 repos?

The overall picture is clear: 32-bit x86 is still the dominant architecture in use in Fedora. We shouldn't break high volume 32-bit chips in Fedora, nor should we stop optimizing for 32-bit systems.