64 bit Era

[0JK0]

Hi guys.

I have quite an akward question , but lets go on.
I haven't been into hardware for the last 2 years and my knowledge stoped at the entry on Venice core on the A64 morket. Recently I have been working on a big school project , and I am comparing the architecture of Athlon XP and Athlon 64. With now the time of all processors on the market supporting the 64 bit, I have some doubts of how should my conclusions should look like.

My q is: have you guys switched form 32 bit verion of windows to 64 bit of windows , in order to take full advantage of your beastful CPU like Core duo or X2's ? Is there a big differance?

The more opinions I have the better, it will certainly help my conclusions!

 

[o1die]

I have tried 64 bit vista with 2 gigs of pc3200, and noticed no difference in performance over 32 bit. I wouldn't use either one. Both versions are too slow in their present form.

 

[Avalon]

I haven't switched to a 64bit version of Windows yet. 32bit XP is much more mature, so I run that instead. I may switch to 64bit Vista when it's released, but only if it's as good or faster than 32bit Vista....which in turn better be as good or faster than 32bit XP, or I'm not switching at all

 

[SynthDude2001]

I just recently switched from (32 bit) XP Pro to x64 after selling an HDTV tuner that didn't have x64 drivers. I'm quite happy with the OS itself, but driver support is still very iffy on non-mainstream hardware. My main reason for switching was to be able to make use of 64-bit media encoders and such (I have a dual-core Opteron), but honestly there's just very little available right now (and I don't have >4GB of RAM yet either). I don't regret switching, but I'm also not really getting a whole lot out of it either.

 

[aka1nas]

64-bit XP has suffered from relatively poor support from MS and developers, so there has been relatively little gain to running it. 64-bit Vista may change this somewhat, but it will not have the application compatability and app shimming support that 32-bit Vista will have so that will be a black mark against it.

Most likely, the next major version of Windows after Vista will either be 64-bit only or primarily 64-bit with a 32-bit port for legacy machines.

 

[Some1ne]

I have tried 64 bit vista with 2 gigs of pc3200, and noticed no difference in performance over 32 bit. I wouldn't use either one. Both versions are too slow in their present form.

Too slow? Vista runs just fine (in terms of performance...it does seem a bit unhappy with my video card/driver though, and likes to blue-screen when I try to go into 3d mode) on my overclocked conroe build that's faster than any prebuilt consumer-level system you can buy. You're just not running it on the right PC, since once you do that, Vista is plenty fast.

have you guys switched form 32 bit verion of windows to 64 bit of windows , in order to take full advantage of your beastful CPU like Core duo or X2's ? Is there a big differance?

No, haven't switched, because 64-bit Vista is nowhere near as mature as the 32-bit variant (despite claims that they're "about the same", they're really not). Besides that, there are still virtually no 64-bit drivers for Vista or XP64...at least with Vista 32-bit, you can generally load the Windows XP version of the driver, and it will still work.

 

[0JK0]

thx guys. I just wanted to know whether u need to have a 64 bit system to measure the 64 bit processor potential, since I am doing some serious comparison between A64 and AXP and I was't sure if my test run at Win XP 32 bit are very objective. Now I see it's not necessary, since no body does it.

 

[0JK0]

Hi, I have 2 more questions.
After my tests I noticed that A XP was faster( by aboout 2%) in in CPU ALU (Sandra 2007) and in MUlti Media test (Sandra 2007)(by about 10 %!!!). Do you guys know what can be the reason for that, and how it is related to the architecture of both processors?

Another thing : A64 was definiately faster in CPU ALU, that is becuase

"so-called SIMD operations (SSE, SSE2), which are a special case, profit from 64 bit processing. A 64 bit processor can natively calculate the important 64 bit floating point format ("double precision" - precise up to 15 digits) and is therefore faster - this is the main reason why 64 bit processors take the lead in the floating point benchmarks. "

but I can't still find the reson why is A 64 so superior in Memory Bandwidth ( is it just an integrated memory controller?). Any suggestion appreciated!!!! Thx in advance!!

 

[Pabster]

The memory bandwidth advantage is due to the on-die memory controller. Keep in mind that in almost all cases, such a synthetic benchmark doesn't tally with real world performance. There are a couple exceptions (ScienceMark comes to mind) but overall such synthetic tests mean nothing.

There was a time when RAMBUSt had phenomenal RAM bandwidth as well... didn't mean squat.

 

[Bobthelost]

The A64 architecture is more efficent and more powerful than the AXP one, the 64 bit is mostly irrelevant to this as 64 Bit means you get to use more RAM than 2GB (well, 3.2 technically but that's another story). I agree with pabster, some real world tests would be good. Perhaps a video encoding job (although you'd have to be careful to remove the HD element from the equation).