What does 64bit actually give you.

[Terabyte]

I was asked this the other day.
And I found.. I really did not have a definitive answer for the guy.

What does 64bit software actually result in... and why?
Assuming the software is taking full advantage etc...
Say you had identical systems... one on 32bit and one on 64bit..
What do you notice between them.

 

[Guest]

One big advantage is more than 4giga addresses in one word. On the hardware side of things it's like comparing a V8 to a 4 cylinder...more of everything it's the american way.

On the software side of things good luck finding anyone who can honestly say they needed it. Maybe a scientist here and there.

 

[Terabyte]

so it's just a reason to stick an extra couple of gigs of ram? :lol:

with 32 bits you couldn't have more than 4gb's?

 

[greenmachineiijh]

In reality, not much... at the moment. Software is scarce, as Knewton pointed out. When things become more mainstream is when I would look into upgrading to a 64 bit system. a year or so. Trust me. I am in the biz.

 

[Action_Man]

You also get twice the amount of general purpose registers and SSE registers.

 

[pat]

so it's just a reason to stick an extra couple of gigs of ram? :lol:

with 32 bits you couldn't have more than 4gb's?

Not so fast.. it take a 64 bits operating system too, not only a 64 bits CPU.

Usually, it takes something or someone to start things. So, with no 64 bits software, why 64 bits CPU? And with no 64 bits CPU, why 64 bits software?

So, AMD started the train, and now software designer just have to jump in the wagon...

 

[Ned_Flanders]

I think encoding tasks like the boost from 32 to 64bit.

 

[K8MAN]

My favourite benifit is being able to run Winxp64. Virus-free bliss and much snappier if you have 2 gig's of RAM or more.

 

[nitto1320i]

I think encoding tasks like the boost from 32 to 64bit.

exactly! its one advantage for encoding and fast decode for programming.
eg. decrypting/encryting on a 32bit with long signatures takes advantage of the 64bit to see it shorter. seeing it smaller which take forever for a 32bit appz/prog to decode. :lol:

so it means, when it comes to performance? not much.

 

[sepuko]

Still relying on rotating magnetic platters? Almost no advantage of those 64 bit devices actually, i think the CPU can still process much more data per second than the sata(I/II)/SCSI interface(or channel should i say?) can feed.

 

[Stimpy]

You would be supprised, with modern SANs the amount of data that can be pushed up to the CPU in one go is way over the maximum bandwidth of any CPU, OK latency is much higher.
e.g. our SAN as 64GB of cache and is attached via 4 fibre cards.
and our bottleneck is CPU backing up (not much calculation done when backing up). An upgrade to 64bit vastly improved backup times.

 

[sepuko]

Yes, you're right and I'm sorry I didn't mention about those cases. But in the case of people asking what advantage would a 64 bit CPU offer to them it is clear they do not work with SANs. Otherwise they wouldn't ask such questions. So in his case, it's probably a 7200 rpm sata(I/II). Now that's a bottleneck. RAID can be helpful but not so much. The future is in data storage with no mechanical parts and faster interface.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Say you had identical systems... one on 32bit and one on 64bit..
What do you notice between them.

Hard drive and storage-related softwares and drivers run faster. **shrug** Various codecs run faster. Professional graphics softwares that use gigantic ammounts of memory run a little faster.

Not too much software really uses 64-bit integer operations regularly enough for anyone to notice a side-by-side comparison difference.

For the most part 64-bit extensions just make people feel better because now they're supposedly "future proof".

Don't get me wrong. Some people actually do need (or at least take real advantage) of it. The number of those people are vastly smaller than the number that think they need it, but some people really do. They're just few and far between.