On Nov 15, 2007 3:39 PM, erik quanstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu Nov 15 18:14:18 EST 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > this question also came up in bay area plan9 meeting. would be nice to > > know the status. i think unix adopted 32-bit earlier than other OSes. > > but for 64-bit, others have gone ahead. > > > > 64 bits is neither here nor there in a vaccuum. you want 64 bits if > a) you need more than 4GB of memory, or > a) those extra registers and direct vlong really matter for performance. > otherwise it's just a lot of extra zeros. > > it's kind of silly to run 64-bit linux on a machine with <= 4GB of memory. >
Per your second a), performance does often improve quite a bit with 2x the general purpose registers. RAM is dropping in price too... why not run 64bit all the time then?
