Whens a good time to move on to 64 bit?

[offie]

Hi there

Whens a good time to move on to 64 bit?

Theres no point at present as

A - There is very little 64 bit software, and those that do support it are not *pure* 64 bit apps, (e.g. windows xp "64-bit, give us more money" edition)

B - The hardware is still in development - new 64bit sockets seem to be coming out as frequently as a full moon.

C - New technologies, e.g. SLI, being developed.

It seems to be an area of development and improvement at the moment with regard to 64 bit systems. there is hardly any software that supports 64 bits yet... anyways, whats your opinion?

cheers

offie

[Áedán]

The whole idea of the backward compatibility is that you can move to a 64bit system whilst retaining the ability to run your legacy applications. There's no major issue with running a split 64/32bit system, in the same way there was no major issue running a split 32/16bit system. Windows didn't do a good job of it, but there were plenty of other OSes that managed quite well with core components that were only 16bits.

At the moment, the biggest advantage of 64bit is the memory space that can be addressed. Some applications really benefit from being able to handle more than 4GB worth of memory!

[XeroHouR]

64 bit means 64 bit alu's which means double the execution units getting done. They are just plain faster than 32bit...Often times up to 2x as fast on the whole, at the same clocks. Socket 939 is your best bet, wait until 3 months after NF4 comesout, that way SLi will be available on the board u buy(if nf4 is the one with dual PCI-E slots....), and the processors and boards should be down to a respectable range by then. As for now you can get a 3000 S939 system for like what 250? good air cooler and clock it to 3800, I'm pretty sure that a system lik ethat with good memory and some tweaks would smoke my p4 in gaming. Its not a terrible idea to get one pretty soon is alls I'm sayin

[woodeirl]

wait for another while then look into getting the system im not going to say much more because the lads said enough to cover u

[offie]

aha i see. i'll save the pennies then

Wooderill by the way.. remember this:

http://www.aoaforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27269

pm'd you and posted on that thread but you didnt answer

cheers

offie

[woodeirl]

yeh i totally forgot, sorry buddy please accept my apologies for this mishap but i cant buy it now at the momnet with christmas and all, but i will def buy that moniter of you in Janurary if you want because i need it for the Stereroscopic Glasses.

im only using a standard moniter for Gaming etc that will only pump out 85hz max @ 1024*768 and lower refresh rates at higher res.

if your interested i will def buy it in jan.

but what price will you sell it for? with shipping?

[offie]

hi there dude,

no problemo, shoot me a mail and we'll talk via email:

offie_@hotmail.com

cheers

offie

[Áedán]

Originally Posted by XeroHouR

64 bit means 64 bit alu's which means double the execution units getting done.

It doesn't mean double the execution units. A 64bit ALU (arithmetic logic unit) simply means it can handle 64bit numbers. You don't need a 64bit processor in order to have a 64bit ALU. For example, the MMX operations work on 64bit numbers, which means that MMX instructions are already using 64bit ALU. In fact, both SSE and SSE2 are already operating on 128bit numbers, so there is a 128bit ALU in there!

[GrahamGarside]

Just because something new is due out doesn't mean that buying a system now would be a mistake. I bought a s754 system just before 939 was due out and the only thing I missed out on was how overclockable the newer boards would be which isn't a major problem seing as my chip topped out at 2.6ghz so the fsb wasn't the problem.
People who bought the first batch of 939 systems may have wished they'd waited for nf4 boards but these loose their major appeal unless you want sli
the only reason I would wait for newer technologys is that they bring the price down of the current batch of systems
Contrary to what I just said though, with nf4 being so close I would wait for this, if only because nf3 boards will drop in price
as for the use of 64bits, well a free beta of win64 is available to us, and 32bit software will run on it, often faster than on plain old xp, it's not ready to replace your 32bit version yet but it's definately useful to have, the only reason I haven't used it much is my adsl modem doesn't work and I've been to lazy to setup my linux router

[woodeirl]

ok then no probs offie i surely will thanks again and check your email

[Bring the Noise]

Offie - Wait until after Christmas and catch a good sale price on a nforce3/3500 combo or wait until around march and get a nforce4/3800 combo.

By March the 3800+'s should be at 90nm and reduced in price and the nforce4 board will be at a good price point as well.

Now Aedan, you have to remember their are more registers within the Opteron that in 32bit mode are currently not used.
In 32bit the K8 has 8 GPRs (General Purpose Registers), 8 FPRs (Floating-Point Registers), and 8 SIMDs (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) registers.
In 64bit it doubles the available number of GPRs and SIMD registers to 16, up from 8 each. Leaving the FPU to be handled by SSE2 registers.

Now for FPU's add on FPU's have been pushing past 64bit for a while.
3D Now (introduced on the K6-2's) was an 80bit FPU, SSE was 64bit, and SSE2 is 128bit...

What I'm wondering is, why AMD didn't tweak 3D Now, it was 80bit and faster then SSE (even though it worked throught the x87/MMX registers). 3D Now Pro was offered on the K7's and doubled the 80bit FPU register's (ontop of the cpu's on high end FPU).

Then again it probably wasn't hard for AMD to re-work the 3D Now registers into handling SSE instructions.

[GrahamGarside]

it's simple, developers were far more likely to support intels versions of the simd instruction sets and it would save amd a lot of head ache with either developers doing what valve have done with half life and optimising it for one platform over the other or even not supporting 3dnow.

[Gizmo]

I suspect it had to do with SSE being 'good enough' that there wasn't a compelling advantage any more for developing 3D Now! While 3D Now! had a significant advantage over MMX (from what I understand) the same could not be said of 3D Now! compared to SSE. Plus, as Graham points out, it's another instruction set that developers have to compile for.

[GrahamGarside]

mmx wasn't actually that good for games, it's integer based and couldnt be used at the same time as the fpu