64-bit

[Tomas Lindquist Olsen]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
> "Fawzi Mohamed" <fmohamed at mac.com> wrote in message
> news:hbhi5q$1gqm$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> On 2009-10-18 20:01:26 +0200, language_fan <foo at bar.com.invalid> said:
>>
>>> Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:35:53 +0200, Fawzi Mohamed thusly wrote:
>>>>
>>>> on x86 the 64 bit extension added registers, that makes it faster, even
>>>> if as you correctly point out a priori just using 64 bit pointers is
>>>> just a drawback unless you have lot of memory.
>>>
>>> That is very silly claim. First, you need to have use for all those extra
>>> registers to obtain any performance benefits. This is nearly not always
>>> the case.
>> Probably you don't know x86 architecture well, it is register starved for
>> modern standards, also with the 64 bit new instruction were added, on x86
>> the 64 bit change was not "add 64-bit pointers" but it was let's try to
>> fix some major shortcomings of x86.
>> These enhancements are available only in 64 bit mode (to keep backward
>> compatibility).
>>
>> I know for a fact that my code runs faster in 64 bit mode (or you can say
>> my compiler optimizes it better), and I am not the only one: for sure
>> apple converted basically all its applications to 64 bit on snow leopard
>> (that is focusing on speed), so that they are slower :P.
>>
>
> I'll certainly agree with you on 64-bit x86 likely being faster than 32-bit,
> but Apple is bad example. Apple, at it's cor...erm..."heart", is a hardware
> company. That's where they make their money. If software runs efficiently,
> then their newer hardware becomes a tougher sell (And Jobs himself has never
> been anything more than a salesman, only with far more control over his
> company than salesmen usually have). It's not surprising that for years,
> every version of iTunes has kept growing noticably more bloated than the
> last, despite having very little extra.
>
>
>


It's interesting how Apple is doing a lot to better performance then.
With things like OpenCL and LLVM.