On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 3:45 PM, John Andersen <jsamyth@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not convinced that will yield any real world performance except when moving large chunks of storage around. When manipulating big chunks of data larger registers help. Twice the data moved in the same number of clocks.
For a lot of scientific and media tasks a wider unit is helpful. Look at SSE/AVX/etc. The wider the instruction the more data that can be manipulated at one time. Adding in these special purpose instructions alleviates the need to move the whole chip to a wider instruction. Also, the RAM and other slower factors will hurt it as well.
But not all applications have that need, and lots of things work just fine with smaller registers. Even when you only want 16bits off the bus, you generally load 32 and discard half.
Of course. Word processing and other simple tasks are easily 8 or 16bit capable. It's when you add all the crap(bells, whistles, guis, etc) that you need more power. The faster the chip, the more crap we can run on it to make it as slow as the one it replaced.
The debate of running a 32bit vs 64bit version of OpenSuse on 64bit hardware is still not settled. I doubt it will be that much clearer when you are talking 128bit vs 64bit.
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