dmd platform support - poll

[Bill Baxter]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 8:37 PM, Walter Bright
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>
>> 2. I have absolutely zero interest in 64-bit. To the people annoyed at the
>> limitations of the 32-bit address space: What in the world are you working
>> on? Non-linear video editors and 3D modeling packages?
>
> Games. See http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/x86-64.ars/5
>

Interesting read.  Basically it's not the game playing they say
requires 64-bit, but the game authoring.  That I can certainly
believe.

On the other hand it mentions reports of 30% speed-ups on 64-bit
platforms from the Counter Strike developers.  But apparently that has
nothing to do with having a 64-bit address space, but rather because
the x86-64 architecture has more registers and because the 64-bit CPUs
at the time of writing (c. 2002) had some other performance features
that were missing from the x86-32 CPUs of the time.  I'm guessing all
but the difference in # of regs has leveled out by now.  Wonder what %
boost that gives these days.

--bb