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

[Jarod Wilson]

On Jun 19, 2009, at 4:08 PM, belcampo wrote:

> Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> On Jun 19, 2009, at 1:33 PM, jedi wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 03:34:35PM -0600, match at ece.utah.edu wrote:
>>>> On 19 Jun 2009 at 0:37, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Are people really still afraid of 64-bit? I've had my head in  
>>>>> the sand
> Are there any facts/tests which show the benefits of going 64-bit,  
> aside from the theoretical advantages ?


Being able to address more than 4GB of memory directly and having a  
sane number of cpu registers to work with (x86-specific, mostly  
irrelevant in ppc land, ppc32 isn't register-starved like ix86) are  
certainly more than just theoretical advantages. Granted, a lot of  
desktop users don't need more than 4GB and its taken some time for  
applications to be updated to take advantage of the increased register  
space, but it *is* happening. Anything that relies heavily on  
vectorized code (such as multimedia encoding/decoding) and anything  
that involves a lot of encryption work (VPN, WEP/WPA, disk encryption)  
benefits from the increased register space (assuming software is  
updated for it, that is -- which is the case for a good amount of open- 
source software).


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com