[Wolves] 64/32bit

[Simon Burke]

On 29/3/04 9:23 am, "sparkes" <sparkes at westmids.biz> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Simon Burke wrote:
> 
>> Hiya,
>> Well its coming to my 20th bday (next mon), anyone interested in a p*ss up
>> either this wknd or Monday nite let us know.
> I wish I could but I've used up all my time for good behaviour ;-)
Fair enuff, 



 
> I doubt you will notice an increase of speed using a 64 bit machine even a
> mac ;-)  I've had a 64bit ultra sparc running at 440Mhz for a couple of
> years and although it kicks intels butt at those speeds it is not as fast
> as my gf's 3.2Ghz pc ;-) It does appear to be faster than an intel p3 600
> running debian linux.
> 
> Linux pretty much only uses 64bit addressing in the kernel space any way.
> User programs are almost always 32 bit.  The extra 32bits are mostly ownly
> responsible for quicker usage of diskspace and not really extra speed.
> This is why most 64 bit distros contain the majority of the user space
> stuff compiled using 32 bits.  You can run 64 bit programs (sparc64
> contains two versions of gcc and some libs so compilation is easy) but
> they will not normally run any quicker than 32bit ones.
> 
> The speed increase you got on macs was probably due to wider busses in
> some of the main bottlenecks and not raw extra power.  Macs are pretty
> well designed and the architecture is pretty suited to the unix like os
> they are using now but is the whole system running 64 bit or just part of
> it?
> 
> sparkes
True, mind it would be a lot faster than anything a have as its the dual
2Ghz G5 mac, so its a wee bit quick. I'm not sure just how much is 64bit
myself. I'd like to hope that most of osx is but as its based on freeBSD 5
so I just don¹t know. I know the machine can handle 64bit apps but I have
never found the need to, unless all of a sudden M$office, mozilla and Adobe
Creative Suite have suddenly gone 64bit?? heh