64-bit vs 32-bit with only 1MB L2 Cache

[soccerballtux]

How big of a deal is this? Thinking of installing 64-bit Ubuntu. Not going to need the 8GB of RAM any time soon, but still it'd be nice if it's there.

 

[CTho9305]

I thought the average instruction length went up very little - the penalty is on data pointers. I don't know the answer... it probably depends on workload.

 

[pm]

I agree. It's my understanding the price is paid in pointers, not in instruction length. So programs with a lots of pointer operations suffer. For example, SPICE (a circuit simulation program, http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Classes/IcBook/SPICE/) has a lot of pointers in it and it slows down if you recompile the code directly into 64-bit due to this issue.

 

[ihyagp]

Do it!

Even if you aren't using the extra ram for programs, the OS will use it as disk cache and make the machine more responsive over time.

 

[Acanthus]

Vista and Linux (various flavors) both have precaching features that will load frequently used files in advance to make programs load and do operations more quickly.

 

[Zstream]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
Vista and Linux (various flavors) both have precaching features that will load frequently used files in advance to make programs load and do operations more quickly.

Why? The problem is that explore.exe is single threaded. Go to Server 2008 and you will notice a large difference in performance.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Zstream

Originally posted by: Acanthus
Vista and Linux (various flavors) both have precaching features that will load frequently used files in advance to make programs load and do operations more quickly.

Why? The problem is that explore.exe is single threaded. Go to Server 2008 and you will notice a large difference in performance.

I was referring to his move to 8GB.

 

[bharatwaja]

Originally posted by: Zstream

Why? The problem is that explore.exe is single threaded. Go to Server 2008 and you will notice a large difference in performance.

Really? I mean... like.... Seriously????

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: pm
For example, SPICE (a circuit simulation program, http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Classes/IcBook/SPICE/) has a lot of pointers in it and it slows down if you recompile the code directly into 64-bit due to this issue.

The extra registers (8 new SSE registers, 8 new GPRs) don't help with the matrix math enough to compensate? Is that true for both AMD and Intel processors, or only Intel processors? (I can think of some architectural differences where the Intel x86-64 CPUs don't exactly shine at 64 bit code.)

 

[SickBeast]

I recently installed Ubuntu64 after reading an article that compared Firefox performance in 32 and 64 bit mode. It was 20-30% faster overall, so I switched. In many applications such as 7zip and the like, performance was around 30% faster with the 64-bit OS.

I would recommend Ubuntu64. I'm using it instead of XP right now. I 'downgraded' from Vista a long time ago.

 

[soccerballtux]

Found two articles of value:
http://www.tomshardware.com/re...a-workshop,1775-5.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articl.../core2duo-64bit_2.html

The XbitLabs one especially is very telling.

 

[Concillian]

I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in a 32bit vs. 64bit comparison done 2 years ago. Quite a bit has happened for driver and software development for 64bit Windows in the last 2 years.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: bharatwaja

Originally posted by: Zstream

Why? The problem is that explore.exe is single threaded. Go to Server 2008 and you will notice a large difference in performance.

Really? I mean... like.... Seriously????

Would like to know more about this.

 

[SickBeast]

Here are some more performance numbers in Firefox

 

[SolMiester]

Originally posted by: Arkaign

Originally posted by: bharatwaja

Originally posted by: Zstream

Why? The problem is that explore.exe is single threaded. Go to Server 2008 and you will notice a large difference in performance.

Really? I mean... like.... Seriously????

Would like to know more about this.

I would.!