When our CAD people work on large 3D models, Autodesk Inventor will happily gobble up 32 GB of RAM, and if they had machines with 64 GB, I suspect it would make

When our CAD people work on large 3D models, Autodesk Inventor will happily gobble up 32 GB of RAM, and if they had machines with 64 GB, I suspect it would make good use of those, too. Also, I am told editing high-res graphics and video benefit both from the larger address space and the ability to use more RAM. But I admit, these are the exception to the rule. Having used both Linux and Windows in 32 and 64 bit versions - in a few cases on the same machine -, I did not notice a difference in performance[1]. If the performance hit due to 64bit is really that substantial, I could imagine the larger number of registers (and possibly larger caches) make up for that. [1] Possibly, as so often in the days before SSDs, I/O was enough of a bottleneck that the difference between 32 and 64 bit code became unnoticeable.