On 6/14/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
And as I said anything using floating point will benefit quite a bit.
gcc will hopefully also get better at optimizing for the amd64
architecture over time.
I hope so, too, but I am far from convinced. In my tests gcc 4 has been
a very small improvement for 32bit code on my Athlon64, but it produces
slower 64bit code than gcc 3.4. And I hear that Intel CPUs are very
inefficient with 64bit code.
I guess the real question then is: Does the benefits for those programs
give enough to warrent a tiny loss on many smaller utilities? Running
mixed 32/64bit on one system is just a pain, so in my book the trade off
is worth it.
I agree with this statement, but I think the real question is: why is
it such a pain to run a mixed system? 64bit is intended to be an
improvement, and as such it should be able to run legacy code!
Thomas