[ale] OT: 64 bit laptops

[kaboom at gatech.edu (Chris Ricker)]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Greg wrote:

> 64 bits only is better than 32 in some respects - high end
> graphics,modeling,multimedia, (perhaps mathematics) and huge databases.  I
> have a UltraSPARC-IIe (64-bit SPARCv9 processor) and it drags on Solaris, is
> ok on OpenBSD but the word from others is that they still get better mileage
> on 32 bit architectures.  Or as one person advised me "64-bit applications
> tend to be a tad bit slower than their 32-bit counterparts so even though
> I'm running a 64-bit SPARCv9 kernel, I still compile those apps as 32-bit
> programs using the Sun compilers and optimize the heck out of them."

That's true for most (sanely designed? ;-) CPUs. It's actually not true for 
the AMD64 -- 64-bit code often runs faster because the CPU is so 
register-starved in 32-bit mode.

later,
chris