[Nottingham] Nottingham Digest, Vol 300, Issue 8

[Richard Ward]

tony atkins wrote:
> boring
> how about some actual facts? doh!
> if you don't use 64 bit and you are capable then you are so stupid
If you still get use out of functionality only available to 32 bit 
binaries then it makes no sense to make your life difficult.

> 
> much quicker
Not much. If your doing heavy scientific calculations then yes. But for 
most user applications the difference isn't that noticeable. Of course, 
this situation will improve somewhat as compiler/vm optimizations 
improve. 32 bit has been around for a long while and some programs are 
heavily optimized for it... the developers still won't have had the time 
to optimize for 64 bit and so some are therefore slower on 64.

Not to mention running 64 bit uses more memory than running 32 bit. Not 
generally by a vast amount, but significant if you don't have bags of 
RAM to begin with (one of my sticks recently died while I was poking 
around in my machine. I didn't touch it I swear!).

> do the math dumbo
> anyone know the track "Slow tow train to Lhasa"
> anyways when 256 bit is doing the bizness no doubt nlug will be debating 
> how 32 bit apps work well with thier bbc model b's
> 
> get real get now
> we should be hounding people who program to stop thinking 32bit
> hell we should be hounding them to multitask across processors not silly 
> stupid 32 bits
> 
I'd argue we should be hounding programmers to write 
architecture/platform independent code, and leave optimization to the 
compiler. Then their code will still work fine when we have 256 bit 
architectures (Imagine how much RAM you could have!). WRT to 
multiprocessing I'd generally rather have 2 slightly slower, stable, 
useful programs than one parallel processing really really fast one. You 
still get the benefit of having many cores when running two things at 
the same time.

> 64bits + sata drive and you are cooking

Now, sata drives *are* brilliant. When I got my first it felt like the 
biggest single jump in speed I'd experienced from upgrading a part since 
I first bought a Hardware T&L graphics card. Though its possible the 
drive I had prior to that was just rubbish. Also the cables are much 
nicer than the horrible old grey ribbon cables. And no finger hurting 
molexes (molices?) to worry about.