Richard Fish wrote:
On 9/18/06, Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm putting together a new system and I'm considering going 64-bit.
Is the benefit of such a system pretty much speed? What are the
drawbacks of using a 64-bit system with Gentoo?
You'll only notice a speed increase with applications that need to
caculate very large numbers, like encryption keys and certain
scientific apps. Everything else will basically run just as fast in
32-bit mode as it will in 64-bit. There are exceptions in certain
media encoders that don't have hardware optimizations for 64-bit, that
may actually run faster as 32-bit apps.
Applications compiled in 64-bit mode can address larger blocks of memory
without paging. Memory intensive applications can greatly benefit from
this. Another minor difference is that chess engines based upon
bitboards (i.e. Crafty and GnuChess), when compiled in 64-bit mode will
perform much faster due to the fact that an entire board representation
fits into a single WORD. On 32-bit systems, such a board is split
between two words and there is overhead with juggling this deficit.
Tom Veldhouse
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