[LAU] OT: 32-bit vs 64-bit speeds

[Dave Phillips]

david wrote:
> Just curious, but I've heard that 64-bit OSes are slower than 32-bit 
> ones. That seems odd to me. Any truth to it?
>   

I recently published an article superficially comparing the 64-bit 64 
Studio distro with the 32-bit JAD distro. Both are running on AMD64 CPUs 
here (3200+ and 3800+), the JAD system is running on the faster of the 
two. I didn't do a lot of scientific comparison, but Ardour's status 
display was revealing, its performance was clearly superior on the 
64-bit box. I also edited some video files with LiVES, again with much 
better performance on 64 Studio. However, 32-bit JAD has much to 
recommend it, so please don't take this comparison as meaningful beyond 
certain bounds (and I think a 64-bit JAD is already in the works).

Obviously the memory handling capacity is much greater on the 64-bit 
machine, and I expect that we'll all be running 64-bit boxes eventually.

Best,

dp