Why not all 64 bit software yet?

[Compman55]

When XP was rumored to release a 64 bit version, it was a waste as there was little software that could be taken advantage of.

Fast forward to today, what is the hold up? We have all this awsome hardware, and there is still stuff written for 32 bit.

 

[corkyg]

And there are still a lot of X86 machines out there. Unless you are a gamer and do a lot of multitasking, 64 bit does not become that necessary. There are now programs that can serve either 64 or 32 bit.

 

[Gunbuster]

Most programs don't need to shove over 4GB into ram.

 

[Nothinman]

Because most software for Windows is closed source and the developers don't care. That's one of the downsides of the extensive backwards compatibility that MS maintains. I've had a nearly fully 64-bit Linux install for a decade now just because it was ported to 64-bit systems way back in the early 90s so most of the quirks were worked out very early on and the source was available so people could recompile to an alpha or sparc64 target to work out the bugs of almost anything they wanted.

Most people equate the 64-bit with the larger memory addressing you get, but there are security and other minor performance benefits as well. Lots of apps don't need >2G of VM space so porting them just on that basis would be missing the point.

 

[lamedude]

Mo binaries mo problems
Its easier to test and ship a single 32bit program. It doesn't help that Intel is still shipping 32bit only Atoms.

 

[xSauronx]

Because most software for Windows is closed source and the developers don't care.

im becoming more and more convinced that they also just dont want to learn the new operating systems. i keep running into vendors at various customers that dont support server 2008 or windows 7

hell, one told me today that they recommend server 2003 but some customers are running fine on server 2008

 

[HeXen]

I'd rather see more 64bit games, in the respect that they actually make more use of the ram. The few 64bit apps i have used, I saw no difference. I'm sure the performance is there, just wasn't noticeable to me.