Ioan Ionita wrote: > I'm a regular kind of Desktop user myself and I'd never move back to > 32-bit. I've been on x86_64 for almost 2 years now and it's been > wonderful. My benchmarks have shown a 20% performance gain on some > workloads.
What workloads? Are you comparing using the same hardware? To me, the advantage of 64-bit is when you have more then 4G ram or are working with very large ( > 4G ) files. It is also useful if you are doing extensive numerical calculations that need high accuracy. In most cases a 64-bit executable or library is about 20% larger than a 32-bit executable and takes longer to load and uses more ram, but at the speed and size of most systems today, this may be negligible. Human interface research has shown that applications like the desktop need somewhat more than a 20% increase to be noticeable. For instance, I really can't tell the difference in interface speed between my main system, 3.2 GHz system, and my wife's 1.8 GHz system. I do notice the difference when doing compiles though. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
