Quote:
Originally Posted by Nathanael
there's no legitimate reason for running a 64-bit OS other than to support gobs of RAM
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Whoever says that is wildly ignorant. See
the wikipedia article. The most important changes (beside the larger address space) are the new registers (both GP and XMM) and making SSE instructions core (which makes it safe for compilers to use them since they have to be supported).
These other changes alone make the Sigil x64 versions consistently 10% faster at common tasks. The same is true for lots of other programs. Just the doubling of the number of GP registers from 8 in x86 to 16 in x64 moves register pressure from "extreme" to "manageable".
True, pointers getting bigger (from 32 bits to 64) hurts cache locality, but the other improvements generally make up for it.