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139 Comments
- Error601, on 10/18/2007, -12/+55My favorite line: "And aside from 'nix operating systems, nothing supported true 64-bit computing until Microsoft's lacklustre attempt at re-doing Windows XP in 2005."
So, if you exclude everything but Windows, nothing supported it until Windows XP in 2005. - wilsonthecat, on 10/17/2007, -0/+4264 bit machines have bigger registers. There saved you 5 pages of article. What's a register? Ok you might need to read another 5 page article to find that out.
- EXreaction, on 10/17/2007, -4/+33OSX = Unix = *nix
- zephyrprime, on 10/17/2007, -0/+20Let me condense the whole article for people: 64bits is a little faster. It supports more memory. Some other minor niceties. Also, this guy is wrong about programs running in their own virtual space only being possible with with 64bit tech. Separate virtual address spaces have existed for a long time on 32bit machines. This guy really is not qualified to write this article if he doesn't know something simple like this. Also, ""Well, historically, the x86 architecture was finalised with a 16-bit word length for the 8086. This meant that every instruction, every piece of data, and every memory address had to be exactly 16 bits." Wrong. Many many instructions and data items on x86 are more than 16bits big.
- Dokument, on 10/17/2007, -5/+24ha. it has 32 diggs currently..
- av4rice, on 10/17/2007, -2/+19"So, if you exclude everything but Windows, nothing supported it until Windows XP in 2005."
So if you exclude everything except for Windows, all you're left with is Windows? NO WAY - soulpunisher, on 10/17/2007, -4/+19now if only we can get people to write software to work with 64bit code instead of 32bit like most still are...
- BigglesPiP, on 10/17/2007, -5/+19Theory is only theory, real world applications show a negligible improvement running 64bit over running 32bit, discussion over.
The 1st noticeable advantage of 64bit to the end user will be... the ability to use more than ~3GB of RAM. - lambda, on 10/17/2007, -0/+14Correct, except it doesn't have to "switch back" anything. x86_64 CPUs can execute both 32-bit and 64-bit processes in 64-bit mode (e.g. when running a 64-bit OS).
- jgtg32a, on 10/17/2007, -2/+15My personal opinion is that vista should not have come out in a 32bit version, but thats just me.
- AJH16, on 10/17/2007, -4/+16A register is a small piece of memory located on the actual CPU that is very small and useually holds a single word (64 bits in the case of a 64bit processor). Having larger/more registers means that the system can move faster because it spends less time waiting for data to enter the processor. There, saved you another 5 page article.
- Rekutyn, on 10/17/2007, -1/+13*hits head*
- VAXcat, on 10/17/2007, -3/+15And what about 64 bit VMS on the DEC Alpha, years earlier...
- maninblac1, on 10/17/2007, -1/+11He's not wholely wrong, but let's face the facts, the average user isn't doing 64bit complex vector floating point calculations, doing scientific calculations in matlab or things like that. 64 bit's performance advantage over 32 bit is in math computation and then if and only if the values can not be contained in the 32bit number space.
64bit will come into light not because of a performance advantage, but as a necessity as programs get bigger. The only apps now that are 64 bit are (games big memory users), scientific/CAD apps (matlab etc) (big memory users) etc, as you see it's more necessity over anything else. - rootstyle, on 10/17/2007, -1/+10VAX, It's dead Jim.
- toast1226, on 10/16/2007, -2/+10lol when i looked at it, it was at 64 diggs. what a coincidence xD
- init100, on 10/26/2007, -0/+8I'd guess media processing applications (media encoders, media decoders, image processing software, etc) could take advantage of 64-bit processing.
- inactive, on 10/25/2007, -5/+13pheww...for a minute there... i thought register was where i paid for *****
- Wosat, on 10/17/2007, -0/+7in case anyone wants to swim in the deep end:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/x86-64. ... - trogdor282, on 10/17/2007, -0/+6Most things just take a recompile to go 64 bits. Probably with the exception of drivers. And native 32 bit programs work fine on a 64 bit OS. Wherever people need 64 bit, they've already moved up to it. Servers and such. When the average desktop is pushing 4-8 gigs of ram, the average desktop will be 64 bit.
- TheSwashbuckler, on 10/17/2007, -1/+7"Well, historically, the x86 architecture was finalised with a 16-bit word length for the 8086. This meant that every instruction, every piece of data, and every memory address had to be exactly 16 bits."
Well, that's a load of crap. Plenty of instructions were a byte. - whitesaint, on 10/17/2007, -2/+7Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Mac OS X Leopard going to be 64-bit native on systems that support it, and then switch back to 32-bit mode when it runs 32-bit apps?
- inactive, on 10/17/2007, -2/+7Well I saw 128 diggs, I'm looking into the future
- archlich, on 10/16/2007, -0/+5I don't want to sound like a fanboy.... The critical mass is for windows. There already is full 64bit support in all the major linux distributions.
- rootnik, on 10/26/2007, -0/+5You are kidding, right?
I saw a laptop the other day that has 1600MHz FSB. Mobile dual core CPUs make today's laptop faster than most desktops 3-4 years ago, let alone laptops. Lets not begin to talk about the speed of ddr2 ram compared to the pc2100 that was in most of your laptops 3-4 years ago. - fluxion, on 10/17/2007, -1/+6and relative pointers! man those are awesome!
- MacSuxWindozSux, on 10/17/2007, -0/+5Dreamcast!
- lambda, on 10/22/2007, -3/+8A 64-bit mode OS lets you address 2^64 addresses, e.g. terrabytes of RAM
A 64-bit mode process can use all 16 general purpose registers (only 8 can be used in 32-bit mode), improving CPU performance for most workloads - geminitojanus, on 10/17/2007, -0/+4You can actually fake relative addressing with absolute addressing at the architecture level, all relative addressing at the processor level does it remove those extra "faking" steps, which speeds up code execution for PIE/PIC.
- init100, on 10/17/2007, -0/+4"in C such as assuming integers are 32bit"
The size of integers do not necessarily change with a switch to 64-bit. But I agree that one shouldn't assume too much about the sizes of various data types. It's better to use the sizeof() operator. - mindframe, on 10/17/2007, -1/+5Sun had Solaris on UltraSPARC that was 64bit in 1995. Solaris 2.5.1 I think.
- dougmc, on 10/17/2007, -0/+4`However, neither should be confused with IA-64, which is the Intel Itanium instruction set. This is currently the only true 64-bit instruction set in general use today'
They must have a creative version of `only', `true' or `in general use today'. - devikwolf, on 10/17/2007, -0/+4BSD = *NIX
Linux = *NIX - maninblac1, on 10/16/2007, -0/+4Exactly, just like DDR and DDR2, AM2 moved to DDR2, and DDR2 hit 51% of the market, then DDR basically disappeared.
- inactive, on 10/16/2007, -0/+4My computer supports 8GB of ram and has 2 slots, drives me insane trying to find this 4gb RAM at a cheap price
- MacSuxWindozSux, on 10/17/2007, -0/+4Well Back in February Microsoft offered people to sign up on their website to have free Vista x64 DVD's mailed out to anyone who bought Vista x32 or vice versa.
- fluxion, on 10/17/2007, -2/+6stop digging him down you 'tards
- StuffOfInterest, on 10/16/2007, -1/+5It is all a matter of crtical mass in the market and external drivers like the memory crunch. The 80386, the first 32-bit processor in the X86 line, came out in 1987. Windows NT didn't come along four 4 years and Windows 95 didn't come out for 8 years. At some point we'll likely see a full scale shift over to 64-bit for all major software and in the space of one or two years you will have more trouble finding 32-bit drivers for new hardware than finding 64-bit drivers. Just try and find a 16-bit driver for Windows software today.
- rootstyle, on 10/16/2007, -0/+3"or are people just being stupid?"
Not an accusation I would make while at the same time putting a pseudo signature in all my Digg comments. We all see your user name at the top of all your posts, its ok. That and your original post has absolutely no substance, it is essentially 'awesome article!!!11' which could have better been expressed by simply digging the article and moving on. - maninblac1, on 10/26/2007, -3/+6Don't even talk about laptop hardware. The hardware that is out right now for laptops, is only incrementally better than it was 3-4 years ago. Pentium M's can still run circles around most apps, because laptops ares a crippled platform to begin with.
- codyman, on 10/16/2007, -3/+6I use xp x64 sp2 on my laptop and it works great (amd64 3400+). I've been using it as it's daily OS for 2 years now, and haven't run into any problems (except for the mentioned driver issues... which aren't all that bad because my laptop has drivers for everything fortunately.)
Overall, the system is a lot more responsive and even though it is an older machine, I find it faster than a lot of these new laptops (especially vista crippled ones...) in even things such as boot up times / desktop response / app loading times / etc. - Error601, on 10/17/2007, -0/+3There's always the ***** in the crowd. The OS doesn't have to be installed on the computer in front of you for you to be using it. We have this fancy concept called networks.
- init100, on 10/26/2007, -0/+3@maninblac1
What drivers? I guess that you must mean proprietary drivers, since the ones distributed with the kernel work equally well in 64-bit as in 32-bit. But even some proprietary drivers are available in 64-bit versions, such as the nVidia drivers. - andywebb95, on 10/16/2007, -1/+4Yes it was a pretty bonehead line on the authors part considering there were at least two 64 bit operating systems out there (VMS and BSD?) that I am aware of available prior to 2005.
Ironic also because he was pointing out other peoples bonehead comments.
But this article was written for the masses..... and not everyone uses VMS or BSD..... so I could see the point of the exclusion for simplicity purposes. - daridave, on 10/17/2007, -4/+7Idiot. It states "aside from 'nix operating systems, nothing that the average consumer used supported true 64-bit computing". Note the "nothing that the average consumer used " . Very important difference and that DOES make sense. Learn to read, smart ass.
- init100, on 10/17/2007, -1/+4"there were at least two 64 bit operating systems out there (VMS and BSD?) that I am aware of available prior to 2005."
I'm pretty sure that Linux was also 64-bit capable before 2005. - andywebb95, on 10/17/2007, -1/+4Was going to say the exact same thing.
And by years earlier it was QUITE a few years earlier (1992 I believe when the 64 bit Alpha and its supported build of VMS came out).
I don't use VMS at all these days but it is a splendid operating system and a joy to develop for. - whiteguysamurai, on 10/17/2007, -0/+2You win!
Dreamcast is the solution to all life's problems. - init100, on 10/16/2007, -0/+2I was also thinking about this. I'm 100% sure that x86 can use relative addressing. It is a prerequisite for position-independent code, which is used in Linux (and probably other *nix) shared libraries.
- mtekk, on 10/17/2007, -0/+2Intel tried to fix this with the Itanium, but it went over budget, was released too late, and has not made enough strives (ran hot and was slow and is difficult to write compilers for) to make it worth while to adopt in consumer PCs.
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