OK... I didn't want to go into to much detail, which is why I left it at 
that simple explanation.

An OS like Solaris will give the same performance levels in 64 bit mode 
and in 32 bit mode, in average (some things are faster, some slower). 
Windows (but we all knew that in advance) sucks in 64 bit mode. Linux, 
it depends a lot on what you are doing. NetBSD, I haven't tried.

So yes... your milage may (will) vary. But I'm ready to bet my shirt 
that your machine will NOT be faster in 64 bit mode than in 32... People 
don't chose 64 bit mode over 32 for performance, but for capacity.

Gilles.

Quentin Garnier wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 11:22:13AM +0100, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>   
>> Ask yourself why you would want a 64 bit OS...
>>
>> Your system will be shuffling double quantities of information from 
>> memory to CPU and back... and CPU will be doing computation on double 
>> the size of objects. Very often (except in some specific cases) this 
>> results in slowing down your machine compared to 32bits.
>>     
>
> That's not entirely true either;  the processor has many more registers,
> so the stack is less used, and functions parameters are not passed on
> it, so depending on the code, there might be less memory activity.  I'd
> be interested in seeing numbers for the syscall latency, too.
>
> In the end, YMMV.
>
>   

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