Per, On Saturday 10 June 2006 13:24, Per Jessen wrote:
Ralph Ellis wrote:
There is not a huge performance difference between the 32 bit and 64 bit setups unless you have a lot of memory. 64 bit setups can use more than 2 gigs of memory and I believe that it is more efficient.
I don't about any performance differences, but a 32bit machine has no problems utilising more than 2Gb of memory.
But a 32-bit machine does hit its physical RAM limit at 4GB, which is not true of 64-bit architectures. And while relatively few desktop users (perhaps those doing video editing or large-scale scientific computing) will benefit much from going beyond 4 GB, that's probably a situation that will change as software for personal systems becomes every more ambitious. I'm not up on 64-bit systems, but don't they have wider data paths between the CPU and peripherals and RAM? Doubling the width of the RAM data bus will double the RAM bandwidth (for a given RAM / FSB speed) Since RAM access is the biggest limiting factor in microprocessor-based system performance, this would be a big plus. It's going to be ever more important to enhance RAM bandwidth as we go from dual-core (or dual-processor) systems to quad-core and beyond.
/Per Jessen, Zürich
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