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They seem to hype the whole 64-bit stuff a lot. I've had a full 64-bit Gentoo running for quite year and the difference to 32-bit wasn't even noticeable.
by arthurk 18y ago
They seem to hype the whole 64-bit stuff a lot. I've had a full 64-bit Gentoo running for quite year and the difference to 32-bit wasn't even noticeable.
- gaius 18y agoRunning what? Unless you're doing CAD, 3D or video editing, 64-bit on the desktop is just for bragging.
- there 18y agowell he said gentoo, so i guess that means running gcc.
- gaius 18y agoOver and over and over again... :-P
- briansmith 18y agoThat is true right now. Making every integer and every pointer 64 bits is really a net loss performance-wise for most applications because it reduces the number of items that can be cached by 50%. However, it is much easier to write server applications that assume all data can fit in virtual memory. All of my new server-side applications assume that the entire dataset of every process can fit in the virtual address space of the system. Effectively, my applications now require 64-bit machines to handle more than 2GB of data. This allows me to use mmap() and normal memory management (malloc, etc.) and rely on the operating system's VMM to swap for me. This is a vast simplification over trying to implement your own user-space VMM just to handle large files on small (32-bit) systems. I expect that the next generation of server software will all be design this way, and a lot of desktop software will probably adopt this kind of design too.