Dennis Clarke wrote: > You would be surprised how often an open source application gains little > advantage by being a 64-bit build. The same binary on sun4m and sun4u will > operate within 3% of the clock speed limited rate. I am sure you have seen > this too. The creation of and inclusion of chip specific libraries in > dependencies and in ISAEXEC/ISALIST type of directory strucs ( > v8,v8plusa,v9,v9a etc etc ) often duplicates and triplicates the efforts > needed to create a single package. For what gain? > > I am not being argumentative here. I am often wont to do I know. > > I am simply speaking from measured experience. > > The other side of the coin exists also. There are applications in which > the virtual memory space and other goodies ( VIS !!! ) can make all the > difference in the world. I still have a copy of Ultra Computing Volume 2 > here that shipped with the UltraSparc units that had Creator 3D > framebuffers. The performance of certain operations in UltraSparc with VIS > is just blistering fast. > > I am preaching to the choir. Sorry.
While most 64 bit sparc apps are actually slower than the 32 bit versions, I can assure you that is not the case for 64 bit amd binaries... in general, we see a 15% win; sometimes much more. I'm not arguing that we need 64bit versions of all apps - but libraries is probably a good idea. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
