Whats the actual differance with 64 bit and 32

[Scotteq]

i really dont see what her problem is, but we need to keep them sweet.. Right

/agree From personal experience: Fail this at your peril...

 

[MarkG]

(like Mozilla Thunderbird for example which doesn't support 64 bit at this time)

Since when? I'm running 64-bit Thunderbird right now.

 

[xtc28]

From Dec 08

http://theovalich.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/64-bit-java-arrives-64-bit-firefox-and-thunderbird-too/

 

[mactronix]

Since when? I'm running 64-bit Thunderbird right now.

Oh, ok well i will go look on the site again. When i looked last week there was no mention of a seperate 64 bit version and the version i downloaded said it didnt support a 64 bit OS when i installed it.

Mactronix

 

[mactronix]

Thanks for the heads up on the 64bit Thunderbird Mark, I now have it running also. Minus points for Mozilla for making it so difficult to find though.
From thier home page no chance, I had to actually search specifically for 64 bit Thunderbird on the net to find it.

Come on guys (yea i know they wont be reading this) get your act's together.

Seriously though its no wonder people are cautious about switching if even the apps that are 64 bit are so hard to find. Or was i expecting too much to get a choice of 32 or 64 from the home page ?

Mactronix

 

[sminlal]

I'm assuming that there must be parts of the CPU that are dormant when running 32 bit ? so would this mean it uses more power in 64 bit mode. If so does is it enough for more volts when running an OC ?

Think of it like the difference between a 6-digit calculator and a 12-digit calculator. A 12-digit calculator may use more power than a 6-digit one, but if you've bought a 12-digit calculator do you think it uses any less power when you only put 6-digit numbers into it? No, not really.

How does it affect things as far as the bandwidth goes ? again assuming the app is codded for 64 bit then its processing the data twice as fast, or is it just twice as much ? so what effect does this have if any on the buses ?

By far the biggest benefit of 64 bits is that a 64-bit application can use more memory. Any program that NEEDS lots of memory and is limited by the 2GB or 3GB available in 32-bit mode is going to have to do disk I/Os, and since it takes a million times longer to access data on disk than it does on RAM this has a huge performance impact. 64 bits removes the memory ceiling and (for the apps that need it) this is a much, much bigger benefit than anything else.

In terms of mere 64-bit calculations, they're few and far between, and since the performance penalty of splitting a 64-bit arithmetic operation into two 32-bit ones is a mere three-fold or so, it's really not worth thinking about. In a spreadsheet, for example, you'd likely be lucky if one in 100 instructions had to compute a 64-bit number. In 32-bit mode that would translate to the difference between 100 instructions vs. 102 instructions (one of those 100 is replaced by 3 instructions). So the overall effect is pretty negligible.

There may be some very specialized apps that are very 64-bit intensive, but most run-of-the mill stuff (including games, which offload most of the heavy crunching to the GPU), don't really benefit much at all from the 64-bit arithmetic capabilities of the CPU.