Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Tuesday 30 October 2007 08:58, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- BandiPat <penguin0601@earthlink.net> [10-30-07 11:54]: [...]
Moving to full 64bit should indeed be a better choice, you would think, yet many of apps & plugins are still 32bit only.
I believe that this is fluff and not fact. There are a few apps which only have 32bit plug-ins for certain capabilities, ie: I still run 32bit firefox and plug-ins and 32bit java. But *everything* else on my 10.1 system *is* 64bit.
But why? Do you run applications that need a 64-bit address space? If not, it's only more execution overhead to move nearly twice as much data around to get any given task done. The fact that the main system busses are 64-bits wide does not negate this overhead. Almost everything a desktop computer does is RAM-limited (this is even true for most CPU-intensive applications), so using a lot less RAM really does help.
64-bit machines don't use much more RAM. I asked Novell about this, and they suggested that the 64-bit version of SLES 10 only uses about 1% more RAM. There is a difference, but it's not that big. Do you run 64-bit, Randall? I do at home, and I don't really have any memory problems (except with a certain Java application, but I think that's a bug). Also, if you're planning to go over 2Gb, it's the way to go, AFAICS. Things start to get kludgey in the OS above that limit with 32-bit, and it can't help performance.
...
-- Patrick Shanahan
Randall Schulz
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