[mythtv-users] Upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit and maybe a distroswitch?

[Johnny]

> Are there any facts/tests which show the benefits of going 64-bit, aside
> from the theoretical advantages ?

Here is a good write up with some discussion of the issues and some
benchmarks with Ubuntu 9.04. For many thing there is only minimal
improvement while for others, like media encoding there can be very
significant improvement. One of the key differences isn't just the
64-bit vs 32-bit but the fact that 32-bit is generally compiled
against the i386 ISA so you miss out much of the new things like SSE,
etc that has been released since intel released the 386. Since AMD64
implies i686 and the SSE stuff you get code compiled for you
processor's capabilities rather than one that is 20+ years old. Of
course you can get all of this by using Gentoo and compiling
everything yourself.