My favorite take on 64 v. 32 bit is: http://www.statacorp.com/statalist/archive/2005-07/msg00828.html
On 3/5/07, John Fultz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 08:14:22 -0500, G. Vincent Castellano wrote: > > I was helping someone get set up with 0.95 and noticed that the machine <snip>was an Athlon 64. <snip> the performance advantages of 64-bit are dubious. If you do a Google > search on this, you'll find all kinds of comparisons which show that, for > similar 32 and 64-bit applications running under a 64-bit OS, sometimes the > 64-bit outperforms the 32-bit, but sometimes the 32-bit outperforms the > 64-bit. > 64-bit is not theoretically faster, and that's not its principle advantage. > I've not done a large amount of research here, but I think the main > differences > can probably be chalked up to... > > 64-bit speed advantages > + Larger registers > + 64-bit OS doesn't have to do 32-bit address translation > + Possible on-chip optimizations > > 32-bit speed advantage > + Since pointers are 32-bits, apps use less memory, causing fewer cache misses > + Better evolved 32-bit compiler optimizers because the technology has been > around longer > > The real advantage of 64-bit isn't speed, it's memory. Since Quackle remains > well within 2 gigabytes of usage, that aspect of the 64-bit advantage simply > isn't an issue.
