O Plameras wrote: > Given two CPUs one 32-bit and another 64-bit with the same Megahertz or > clock speed, the 64-bit is significantly faster.
That is not right. As you saw from the sizeof experiment, the only thing that changes when going from 32 bits to 64 bits is sizeof(long) and sizeof (void*). Given the same application compiled for the two architectures (and with everything else being equal), the 64 bit one will be slightly slower because all pointers are 8 bytes in size as opposed to 4 bytes on 32 bit architectures. The larger pointer size on 64 bit systems means that more memory to CPU bandwidth is chewed bu transferring the larger pointers to the CPU. Also remember than most high end 32 bit Pentium CPUs have had a 64 bit wide data bas for ages. This was done to maximize the bandwidth from slow dram to the CPU caches. Erik PS : I'm on the list, You don't need to CC replies to me. -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ Erik de Castro Lopo +-----------------------------------------------------------+ "It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trival details of a program -- such as where its bugs are." -- David Keppel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
