John Andersen said the following on 07/23/2013 02:57 PM:
On 7/23/2013 11:40 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:
If you have 4G of RAM or less the real question is 'why bother?'
The main advantage of 64-bit is the address space. For CAD, games and such and massively multi-user servers where there is more than 64G of memory, yes 64-bit addressing counts.
Doesn't PAE play into this some how? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
My understanding is that PAE improvements allow 32bit code to handle up to 6gig of memory and still closely match 64bit performance, and under linux PAE support could handle up to 64gig of memory with a 32bit processor.
At one time the PAE kernel was the OpenSuse default, maybe it still is for 32bit processors.
I tried running it once, its a performance hog, as compromises usually are. It's totally unsuitable for a serious server application, a large database server or the like. You could probably live with it for many desktop applications or if you simply had a desktop with more than 4G of memory and didn't have a 64-bit machine. Humans tolerate millisecond latency much better than high demand server applications. Addressing more than 4G of memory is the best reason I can think of for 64-but architecture. -- At least when humans go to casualty, they generally haven't gone into the Control Panel and messed with the settings... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org