Richard Owlett wrote on 9/7/20 9:12 AM: >> > > Answers I'm seem focused on too low levels. I'm interested in the > end-user experience. > > E.G. what end user observable difference would there be between 32 bit > based browser and a 64 bit based browser? > The short version: what Reco said. The longer version: 64-bit will be faster... not because 64-bit is intrinsically faster (although, depending on the optimisation settings in the compilation, it almost certainly will be faster, as has been pointed out, because of the additional CPU instructions available on 64-bit machines), but basically because the 64-bit CPU is likely to be newer and run at a higher clock rate, and hence faster for that reason alone. I recently retired a debian stable 32-bit machine in favour of a debian stable 64-bit machine. All ordinary pre-built officially supported programs simply worked exactly the same (but /far/ faster: for example, a 10-minute code compile became less than 20 seconds). [I did have trouble with low-level sound in my own code, but that was entirely related to the fact that the sound hardware on the new machine supported only CD-quality sound, and it took quite a bit of digging, learning and a lot of print statements finally to get it to do what happened naturally on the old 32-bit machine when I needed low-quality sampling.] The biggest reason to switch, if everything runs sufficiently quickly on the 32-bit machine, is probably that at some point 32 bits will stop being supported (I vaguely seem to remember that the decision to do that has already been taken by the debian project once, but was revoked). Doc -- Web: http://enginehousebooks.com/drevans
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