Re: [Nolug] 64-bit athlon?

64 bit OS's such as Fedora are designed to take advantage of the extra
memory capabilities by allowing great file sizes, larger process memory
allocations, and the ability to handle more concurrent processes or
"threads".

Since most 32 bit applications were designed to operate under that hard
limit, you will still not see any increases in performance. Even then,
increases in performance are seen because there is less need to use your
"swap" space which requires disk i/o (paging under windows?). So, you
will only see a true performance improvement if your OS and
application(s) were designed to take advantage of the extra address
spacing. I think that the only real market 64 bit systems have with
most end users is for graphics, video editing, and gaming - and that is
only if their OS and apps/games use the full 64 bits.

If you have a huge itch to play with 64 bit systems, consider buying an
old Sun Solaris. They have been 64 bit since around 1995....of course,
it does make your system sound really cool. In my opinion, it is more
worth the $$ to buy a 2 processor 32 bit system with good memory, large
cpu caches, and fast memory buses, but my interests are on the computer
science end as you well know :)...

Brett

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:24:07 -0500, "Joey Kelly" <joey@joeykelly.net>
said:
> On Saturday 23 October 2004 1:11 am, -ray spake:
> > On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Joey Kelly wrote:
> > > Um, what? 32-bit-computing means that you are processing things in
> > > parallel, 32 at a time, unless I'm terribly wrong about this. Yes, 32-bit
> > > leaves you with only 4GB of addressable RAM, but you've got 32 registers
> > > working in parallel. Moving to 64-bit is vastly faster than staying with
> > > 32-bit.
> >
> > Possibly, but unless your apps can keep all the registers running at 100%
> > all the time, then any performance increase is neglible. "Most" apps
> > can't. Bottom line is it depends -- on the app, the processor, and who
> > you talk to. Very large integer number crunching will see a performance
> > boost, most other apps won't. Some even say 64-bit apps are slower than
> > their 32-bit counterparts.
>
> Yes, but if you compile your entire OS and apps for 64-bit, you make use
> of
> all 64 registers, no? I know that windows can't make much use of it now,
> because little if any is compiled for the platform.
> >
> > I think the big push for 64-bit, as Brett said, is to get past the 4-gig
> > limit, and get rid of the hacks Intel currently uses to get past 4-gigs.
> > 64-bit for desktops doesn't make sense, today. It's probably worth the
> > extra money for bragging rights, though.
>
> I plan on getting a mobo that'll take scads of RAM, and add more as I can
> afford it. I really see the new box lasting me 5 years.
>
> --
>
>
> Joey Kelly
> < Minister of the Gospel | Linux Consultant >
> http://joeykelly.net
>
>
> "I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous."
> --- David Bradley, the IBM employee that invented CTRL-ALT-DEL
> ___________________
> Nolug mailing list
> nolug@nolug.org
=====
http://www.brettsbsd.net/~estrabd

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Received on 10/25/04