Comment by Dylan16807

> We shouldn't get rid of good hardware because it's too old, that's wasteful.

Depends on how much power it's wasting, when we're looking at 20 year old desktops/laptops.

> 32 bit is still valid for many applications and environments that don't need >3GB~ ram.

Well my understanding is that if you have 1GB of RAM or less you have nothing to worry about. The major unresolved issue with 32 bit is that it needs complicated memory mapping and can't have one big mapping of all of physical memory into the kernel address space. I'm not aware of a plan to remove the entire architecture.

It's annoying for that set of systems that fit into 32 bits but not 30 bits, but any new design over a gigabyte should be fine getting a slightly different core.

> For example, routers shouldn't use 64bit processors unless they're handling that much load, die size matter there

I don't think that's right, but correct me if I missed something. A basic 64 bit core is extremely tiny and almost the same size as a 32 bit core. If you're heavy enough to run Linux, 64 bit shouldn't be a burden.