[Nottingham] Nottingham Digest, Vol 300, Issue 8

[Sergiusz Pawlowicz]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 22:57, Richard Ward<daedalusfall at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 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!).

a little bit slower: notice e.g. sensitive and very expensive parts:
processor caches. you fill it faster with 64bit addressing.

64bit is useful only if you cannot address enough memory, which is
essential only for advanced usage at desktops or servers.

s.