Paul de Weerd wrote: wittig wrote:
| 64 bit processors (combined with 64 bit capable operating systems) have | the ability to address more RAM than 32 bit processors because 64^2 is a | much larger number than 32^2... lots more RAM addresses).
Oops! that should have read: 2^64 and 2^32
Depending on your software, 64 bit processors can be quite a bit faster. If you're dealing with 64bit integers, using 64bit registers, etc., a lower clocked 64bit CPU might be faster than a 32bit CPU clocking at a higher rate. In short: There is no short answer. It depends on what you're doing.
Point taken, particularly where big integers are concerned.
From what Henning tells us (and what sounds logical to me), grabbing a ethernet frame from a NIC and putting it on another NIC doesn't really change much from 32bit to 64bit. Your compiler also comes into play. If that is more tuned towards a certain 32bit architecture (such as i386) than a certain 64bit arch (because it's less populair, such as sparc64 or hppa64 or mips64), this will impact your performance quite a bit.
If you had to choose between, say, 2 gig RAM and a 32 bit CPU, or 1 gig RAM and a 64 bit CPU, which would be a better choice, in general?
-- -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/ http://robertwittig.net/ http://robertwittig.org/ .
