[ardour-users] New System Installation Question

John Rigg au at sound-man.co.uk
Sat Jul 14 11:38:58 PDT 2007


On Sat, Jul 14, 2007 at 05:07:28PM +0200, Michal Žeravík wrote:
> Correct me, but all major benefit from 64bit
> is ability to address more than 4GB RAM.
> There was no speedup running native 64bit apps on 64bit system for me.
> See article about such benchmark a month ago on phoronix.

Two points: 

1 - An i386 distro will have most of its packages compiled
to run on i386 (apart from the kernel), so many of the faster
instructions on your AMD64 CPU will not be used. An AMD64 distro
will have all packages optimised for AMD64.

2 - AMD64 uses twice as many CPU registers in 64 bit mode as in 32 bit mode.
Depending on the app, the speedup from the extra registers often exceeds
the slowdown caused by using 64 bit pointers.

The trouble with benchmarks is that they don't necessarily reflect
an individual user's workload.

John



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