* Scott Marlowe (smarlowe@qwest.net) wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 13:15, Bill wrote:
> > 2. It is advantageous to buy AMD 64 rather than the Pentium IV?
>
> Yes and no. If having more than 2 gigs of ram is important, 64 bit
> architecures run faster than 32 bit, where having over 2 gigs usually
> results in a slow down due to the memory switching they use.
This is truer on more traditional 64bit platforms than on amd64 which
has more differences than just the ability to handle 64bit size things.
amd64 also gives you access to more registers than were on the
register-starved i386 platforms which increases the speed for most
applications where it usually wouldn't when recompiled for 64bit.
Stephen