On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 10:44 -0700, Alex Perry wrote: > Eric Lacroix wrote: > > >Le ven 01/10/2004 à 17:00, Jérôme Marant a écrit : > > [snip] > Second, AMD64 hardware gives you four specific features ... all of which > are apparent in benchmarks: > * More FP registers, which speeds up computation intensive applications > * Lower latency to main memory, which speeds up memory intensive > applications > * Larger virtual address space, which speeds up database and engineering > applications One thing you missed is the 8 extra GP registers that AMD engineers added to the x86_64 when it's in 64-bit mode. This allows the compiler to better optimize the code, by storing more data on-chip. > * Larger pointers, which slows down dynamic data structure intensive > applications by 3% > The increases caused by the first three bullets usually compensate for > the last bullet ... sometimes dramatically. A report over at Anandtech(?) comparing 32-bit & 64-bit distros showed that benchmarks were anywhere from even to the 64-bit version smoking the 32-bit distro by 50% or more. Truthfully, though, if you're a home user, and the most intensive thing you do on your box is watch movies & play TuxRacer, an AMD Athlon XP 2200+, 512MB RAM, and a US$50 NVIDIA video card are more than enough. But, of course, we're all geeks here, and want the newest and shiniest, so of course, I'd snap up this dual-Opteron(!!!) SFF system, slap in 2GB RAM, a couple of 250GB HDDs (plus an external SATA disk!), and an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT (the top-of-the-line GPUs generated too much heat for such a small box). Typing email and reading web pages will be just as fast as ever! WOW!!!! http://www.iwill.net/zmax/zmaxdp_1.asp http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php? dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD04NzYmdXJsX3BhZ2U9MTE= -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson, LA USA PGP Key ID 8834C06B After listening to many White House, Pentagon & CENTCOM briefings in both Gulf Wars, it is my firm belief that most "senior correspondents" either have serious agendas that don't get shaken by facts, or are dumb as dog feces.
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