Author: Daniel Barlow Date: To: Oxfordshire Linux User Group Discussion List Subject: Re: [OxLUG] Best way to upgrade to 64 bit - and is it worth it?
Peter-Henry Mander <oxlug@???> writes:
> Until everyone has oodles of physical RAM, and I mean 128 to 1024
> gigabytes, there's no big advantage in using 64 bits.
My hazy recollection says that the situation is not quite as clear-cut
in the specific case of x86-64, because when you go to long mode you
additionally get (a) twice as many registers, (b) an ABI that uses the
SSE instructions for floating point instead of the weird x87
stack-based thing. I would not be surprised if either or both of
these (more likely the former) made a significant difference on some codes.
It certainly makes code _generation_ easier ...
