The state of 64-bit Desktop Linux

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Wed Feb 11 19:12:15 UTC 2009


On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 01:40:27PM -0500, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> I'm not sure that running 64 bit Linux would make any appreciable
> difference in performance for those applications.

Well often you can gain 5 to 10% just from the fact x86_64 has twice as
many registers as x86 and that it uses SSE rather than x87 for floating
point.

Also memory hungry applications can use more than 2GB (or 3 in some
cases) of memory each.  Maybe that's actually not a benefit in some
cases (like firefox).

Using more than 3GB of ram in the system also requires PAE on x86, which
involves extra paging and memory mapping calls, which on x86_64 is flat
memory accesses with no penalty.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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