8 ms·
More memory capacity is just one of the use cases. Just to name one example, when doing string comparisons, you can use long integer comparisons under the hood.
by stingraycharles 15y ago
More memory capacity is just one of the use cases. Just to name one example, when doing string comparisons, you can use long integer comparisons under the hood. When using 8 byte longs instead of 4 byte longs, string comparisons are faster.
- dmm 15y ago> you can use long integer comparisons under the hood That's interesting. Does it make up for the increased size of pointers? Caches are under a lot of pressure these days. AMD64 is a weird arch. Is it possible to use 64bit instructions with a 32bit address space?
- mjg59 15y agoYes, but it's ABI incompatible with 32-bit or full 64-bit. https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/ https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/ is an implementation.
- mjb 15y ago> Caches are under a lot of pressure these days. More from data sizes than code sizes, at least in most performance-critical applications. Sure, bigger pointers will lead to higher miss rates in caches that contain code, but that is unlikely to prove to be a bottleneck for real-world browser use (in the current version of the real world).