That seems like a lot of people to abandon! Perhaps the right financial decision, I don't know, but that seems like a significant number of users.
Mate, 20 year old system means a Pentium 4 Prescott and Athlon 64, both of which had 64 bit support. And in another year after we already had dual core 64 bit CPUs.
So if you're stuck on 32 bit CPUs then your system is even older than 20 years.
So you could very well have bought a decent quality 32 bit system after 2005, although the writing was on the wall long before then.
Not really. With the launch of Athlon 64, AMD basically replaced all their 32bit CPUs lineups with that new arch, and not kept them along much longer as a lower tier part. By 2005 I expect 90% of new PCs sold were already 64 bit ready.
You're several years off:
"The FIRST processor to implement Intel 64 was the multi-socket processor Xeon code-named Nocona in June 2004. In contrast, the initial Prescott chips (February 2004) did not enable this feature."
"The first Intel mobile processor implementing Intel 64 is the Merom version of the Core 2 processor, which was released on July 27, 2006. None of Intel's earlier notebook CPUs (Core Duo, Pentium M, Celeron M, Mobile Pentium 4) implement Intel 64."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Intel_64
"2012: Intel themselves are limiting the functionality of the Cedar-Trail Atom CPUs to 32bit only"
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/no-emt64-on-intel-at...
Intel had 80% of the CPU market at the time.
Nah mate, something doesn't add up. I can't buy this. Even the cheapest Atoms had 64bit support much earlier than that and Atoms were lower tier silicone than Celeron so you can't tell me Intel had brand new 32 bit only Celerons in 2019.
My Google-fu found the last 32-bit only chips intel shipped were the Intel Quark embedded SoCs EoL in 2015. So what you're saying doesn't pass the smell test.
My point is this stuff is still in play in a lot of places.
So when you tell me "brand new 32 bit Celeron" it is understood as "just came onto the market".
Am I right or wrong with this understanding?
>My point is this stuff is still in play in a lot of places.
I spent ~15 years in embedded and can't concur on the "still in play in a lot of places" part, but I'm not denying some users can't still exists out there, however I'm sure we can probably count them on very few fingers since Intel's 32 bit Embedded chips never had much traction to begin with.
As in, a product that was manufactured, kept in its original packaging, and "unopened and unused".
(Although there's some allowances for the vendor to test because you don't want to buy something DOA.)
(Although I won't get too angry for someone saying "brand new." "New old stock" is kind of an obscure term that you don't come across unless you're the kind of person who cares about that kind of thing.)
These things that look like institutions, that look like bricks carved from granite, are just spinning plates that have been spinning for a few years.
When I fight glibc dependency hell across Ubuntu 22 and Ubuntu 24, I sympathize with Firefox choosing to spin the 64-bit plates and not the 32-bit plates.
Employees: “We want to use new feature X.”
Boss: “Sorry, but that isn’t available for our wealthy customers who are stuck on Eee PCs.”
Nah.
They will be in dire straights if the Google money goes away for some reason, but right now they have plenty of money.
(not that I think it makes any sense for them to maintain support for 32-bit cpus)
Last i checked, Mozilla was an ad company with Google as the main "donor".