On Tuesday 15 May 2007 04:19, James Knott wrote:
Pueblo Native wrote:
...
I haven't heard about there being no speed advantage.
There certainly is a potential speed advantage, but you won't see it automatically just because you switch to a 64-bit processor (or to a 64-bit OS on a CPU that does both).
However, even ignoring speed, you can handle bigger files, databases etc.
You can handle bigger files and datasets in applications that need to keep their entire contents in primary storage concurrently, which is very few applications. Most applications bring file contents into memory incrementally or as needed and for most applications, I/O time will dominate the running time when operating on extremely large files. As processors get faster (or more numerous), the degree to which both primary (RAM) and secondary (disk) storage become bottlenecks just increases. If you have demanding computational tasks and need to increase the performance of your system when executing such tasks, you have to understand the demands they place on the system and balance your hardware for that demand. Otherwise, just switching to, say, a faster CPU will be mostly a waste.
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