On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 09:23:39PM -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: > > Some benchmarks against a 32-bit build would be interesting. My > understanding is that 64-bit systems have larger binaries, use more ram, > and are slower the equivalent 32-bit systems unless you are doing some > fairly serious number crunching. > Depends on the architecture! Yes, the binaries are bigger (my rule of thumb is 20 to 25% bigger for unstripped binaries). In theory, my mac G5 SMU (the cheap version, single processor, slow memory access) runs faster with fully 32-bit userspace (the kernel needs to be 64-bit for recent 2.6). In practice, for normal desktop use I don't see noticeable differences between mostly-64-bit multilib and 32-bit (and for compute-intensive stuff I'd use a faster box ;)
The thing you are ignoring is the programming model - on x86_64 the 64-bit model means that gcc is no longer register-poor, so there is a lot more scope for the compiler to speed up program exection. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
