On Tuesday 22 March 2005 10:55, "p k" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >I was wondering if anyone would care to elaborate on the advantages if any > >of moving to 64 bit?
Our programs don't need address spaces > 4GBytes (the benefit even to P-1 stage 2 would be dubious, especially since unusually large amounts of physical memory would be required to obtain the performance boost) and a very high proportion of the computational load involves double precision floating point, for which we've been using 64 (or even 80) bit hardware since the original 8086. So the benefits are dubious - except that moving to 64 bit architectures might possibly result in a completely different "tuning" being neccessary in order to extract optimum performance from the processor, just as AMD Athlon needs a different "tune" to Intel PII/PIII. On the other hand, moving to 64 bit integer hardware might have a marked benefit in trial factoring performance - especially if there is exploitable parallelism in the architecture; this has always been a weak point in IA32 designs, even MMX was only of any use for byte or halfword operations. Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
