op systems

[spondulick]

what are the advantages of a 64 bit system compared to a 32 bit system.

[ManofScience]

if it's optimised properly, processing speed.

remember, u can have a 64bit os but the applications are still written for 32bit so won't always take advantage.

[Spacerat]

And the amount of memory you can access - XP / Vista 32 bit will only access about 3.2Gb (even if you have more installed). 64 bit will access some ridiculous amount of memory - the major benefits are when you are using large databases as these are all loaded into RAM rather than being read from disk giving a serious boost in speed.

Cheers,
Spacerat

[cunny]

At the moment not allot of software publishers are taking advantage of x64 operating systems, but however if you do allot of image editing or large databases then you will benefit from the more memory that x64 supports.

The thing is, i like speed on a pc, i do video converting, but still run win xp x86, i do this bu choice as until microsoft sort out windows i wont change.

Again tho its down to personal preferance and the system you have, what you expect from it.

[chroma]

faster processing = nonsense.
most code you will run will be 32bit code which needs to be ported through the legacy microcode, so it will technicly be slower than a dedicated 32bit processor.

Reasons why anyone would want to upgrade to 64bit are as follows.

1: you can address more than 4GB of physical memory on your address bus. (The only useful point from a consumer standpoint)

2: you can specify integer values greater than 2,147,483,647(signed) and 4,294,967,295 for unsigned. 64bits allows your processor to NATIVELY count to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (signed) and 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 unsigned.
This is the only area where speed is an issue, 32bit processors either throw out an exception or split the dword into longs depending on language and compiler.
slap this in a c++ compiler and see what happens.
once it reaches 2,147,483,647 it will either increment to -2,147,483,647 or it will simply crash.


#include <iostream>
using namespace .std

int main (void)
{
int x = 0;
int y = 0;

while (y=0) {
x++;
cout << x << endl;
}

return 0;
}
3: you get to use 64bit general purpose registers which means that instead of having your usual 8 (eax,ebx,ecx,edx,ebp,esp,esi,edi) you now get 16 (rax,rbx,rcx,rdx,rbp,rsp,rsi,rdi,r8,r9,r10,r11,r12 ,r13,r14,r15) which is a bit of a myth if im honest,the x86 architecture has had more than 8 registers for a long time now although these where handled primarily by the processors microcode and the coder was never really able to fully utilise them without using dirty hacks.
The good news is that you now have 16 general purpose registers freely available so you can have less data on the stack, which saves on read write cycles.

4: 64bit floating point precision is good, this essentialy means more accuracy by increasing the ammount of numbers after the . like 3.14 is pi, 3.14159265358979323846 is pi with 20 digits of precision. its more accurate.

5: Extended architectural differences, like SSE3 takes over from the old x87, mmx and 3dnow! ISA's this means a few more SIMD registers to tinker with, this is of course dependant on your individual processor specs though. This is a good move and seems to be steering code away from the god awful x86 ISA, hopefully things will improve to the point where i can issue more than two operands in native assembly and have it work just like a MIPS

Simply put, a 64bit processor can work out bigger numbers without the technical jiggery pokery to achieve the same results on 32bit processors, which is useful for things like server databases, calculating things with a very high degree of accuracy (like trajectories and orbits) and such, as for the home user? theres no real benifit other than "i gortz moar ramz in mah masheen" and general inept epeenis measuring contests.
Give it another 10 years when there's more in the way of native 64bit consumer level code around that will actualy take any of these benifits into account and you'll see a benifit. as it stands software is limited in its ability to use up any of the features outside of enterprise/scientific fields.

[tommyt]

Just remember there is a lot of hardware (esp older kit) that you will have issues with when it comes to drivers for 64-bit. Make sure you check this before installing a 64-bit OS.

[sattboy]

i use xp pro 64bit server edition for my games blazin fast but just for games.no internet nothing

[spondulick]

thanks for all your feedback i think i will stick with 32 bit system for the near future.