[sclug] Comet Quad core offering - cheap high street commoditisation of computers

[Will Dickson]

Alex Butcher wrote:

> b) Because very few end-users have the need for processes to grow to be 
> more
> than 3GB in size (and very few systems will have more than 3GB RAM anyway).

AIUI 64-bit mode also enables various additional registers and other 
goodies, so if you're doing number crunching then 64-bit mode should 
give you better performance even if you don't need lots-o-RAM.

That said, the last time I compared 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Ubuntu 
  on my Athlon64, the 32-bit version felt faster, and the 64-bit version 
had definite stability problems. Wierd. (My guess here is that my mobo 
is iffy in some way - it's a pretty early model.)

Will.