Great!!

It will be alot faster then. I run the 32bit version now and it works also fine.

Hans

Thanks

Hi,

I did understand that but when the platform is there to run it, the applications can be made to run 64 bit and thus much faster.
And i think it is in theire own research interest to have faster 64 bit machines .
A 64 bit 2 Ghz AMD machine with linux X64 is performance wise comparable with the fastest dual core machines running 32 bit.

hans

Hello mussie,
I have discussed this before, but I'll comment on this matter again. The first 64-bit x86 CPU was the 80486 DX, which implemented the 64-bit mantissa for the x86 floating point unit. Since then, more and more 64-bit support has been added. Currently, most CPUs have either 128-bit or 256-bit on-chip bus support. The 64-bit additions to the new CPUs allow 64-bit registers to support 64-bit addressing and double the number of registers. For most purposes, this allows about 10% - 15% speedup. (I base this estimate on the results from a carefully hand-crafted 64-bit math library, comparing it to a hand-crafted 32-bit math library.) Most of the speedup possibilities have already been exploited in the last decade and a half. The major improvement that 64-bit computing allows is addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. Until DRAM prices dropped enough, there was little reason to switch to explicit 64-bit CPUs, which is why they stuck with implicit 64-bit support for so long.

Lawrence

Hello mussie,
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. So 64-bit Linux is much faster than 32-bit Linux for your CPU. My guess is that all your applications and libraries for 32-bit Linux are compiled using the minimal 80486 instruction set but your 64-bit applications are compiled for modern CPUs using the modern SSE instruction sets that run at least 128-bits at a time (I have already mentioned that 128-bit internal bus support was the current minimum). Changing the compiler optimization switches and using recent libraries can really speed up image processing, etc. True, most of this speed enhancement was possible in 32-bit Linux. It is just that people tend to compile for the lowest common denominator. They can take much more for granted with any modern CPU that can run 64-bits.

Which is a point in your favor. I overlooked the fact that people will compile for a more modern computing environment when compiling for 64-bit CPUs.


Lawrence