64bit... has it been long enough?

[dsio]

So... I was talking to some people responsible for outfitting a major division of the AU government with new computers in coming months, they're upgrading to Windows Vista in some areas, but the majority will be sufficiently far off for them to begin use of Windows 7, which they consider mature enough given its Vista underpinnings and the quality of the release candidate.

I agreed with everything they said on the matter and these were smart guys, not your average government IT dropkicks.

Thing is they're planning to be rolling out the 32 bit version of windows vista/7 exclusively with no 64 bit in sight. This is a massive number of computers, and they're going with 3GB of ram in the majority, with 32 bit windows.

It really got me thinking after that. We've had a 64 bit topic here since about 2003, we've had people using 64 bit operating systems for a long time. I switched my last 32-bit linux machine to 64-bit in 2007 when I got an EM64T capable Merom laptop to replace my old Pentium-3-M, and while some quirks existed over time, there are no problems left on the platform, not flash, not java, not games, not anything.

And that's a good thing really, I run 4GB in my laptop and 8GB in my desktop, with my next machine probably having more (I realize you can go past the limits with PAE on 32bit but 64bit makes it moot).

All the processors are 64-bit capable, so why isn't it here yet, and when will it be?

[ccperf721p]

Every app I use for my business is still written in 32 bit, while they will run under a 64 bit OS they do not run nearly as fast.

I have found 32 bit linux to still be a bit faster for my encoding chores so I have stuck with 32 bit there as well..

[Áedán]

That's interesting. One of the advantages of using 64bit mode is that there are more working registers on board the CPU. In 32bit mode, there are 8 working registers. In 64bit mode, there are 16 working registers. (It would have been good to see more, but such is life).

This doubling is generally good for performance, as you can hold more data onboard the CPU core, without having to go out to cache or RAM. Generally things like encoding, crypto and compression gain a small boost from this. From what I've seen, it would typically be around the 10% performance increase mark. Obviously it depends on the encoding - for example, Ogg looks to be about 70% faster encoding on 64bit!

[dsio]

In the server world some of the web application servers gain a fair bit from 64-bit mode, Zope being the first to come to mind.

The thing that annoys me is the fact that we've got these two and have had them for so long in parallel. If we were forced to move to 64 bit, deal with the issues, and move on that would be one thing, but the fact that both still exist and likely will for many years to come is just irritating.

[cloasters]

AMD sure busted its but making consumer 64-bit a reality. I don't know if they actually made money on that campaign?

[danrok]

Originally Posted by cloasters

AMD sure busted its but making consumer 64-bit a reality. I don't know if they actually made money on that campaign?

From a marketeer's point of view 64 is a bigger number than 32, so has to be good for sales, right?

[cloasters]

The halcyon days of AMD. It would be great if they could out do Intel for a while again.