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are the duo's only 32 bit ?
- Thread starter dberg
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dberg said:
I'm sort of wondering why people care. What difference does it make in the end-user experience realm?
no i just remember a lot of speculation during the Intel transition that since OS X was a 64 bit OS running on 64 bit CPU's they didnt anticipate for them to go backwards until Intel had a 64 bit mobile chip. That was all i was curious about. I know I dont _need_ 64 bit cpus I was just wondering if they actually took a step back in order to go two steps forward.
The vast majority of the computers out there are 32 bit, it doesn't constitute a performance handicap in any but a few applications. Most applications aren't written to take advantage of 64 bit CPUs anyway.
As previously mentioned here and numberous time in the past, 64bit is only in it's usefullness at > 4GBs of RAM. I believe the actual processor is still a 32-bit;only memory addressing is 64bit; hence the name EM64T (Extended Memory 64 Technology).
I may be wrong, so if someone is more educated on the processors, feel free to speak up. My understanding is that the processor is still simply 32bit.
I have no knowledge on the PPC platform, so I do not know rather it was a true 64bit processor or if it is like EM64T.
Again it all comes down to memory addressing. In my opinon, 64bit (EMT64T,AMD64,etc) is all just hype. Until you have more than 4GB of RAM and actually using it, you will not benefit from it. As far as the laptop processors being 64bit, can you actually put more than 4GBs in a laptop? Last I looked you can only purchase 1GB SODIMMs (total 2GB in the current laptops). If you are concerned about future upgrades, more than likely when the time comes that you can actually get 4GB SODIMMS (totally 8GB) the current laptops will be so outdated it would not matter.
Desktops or for that matter servers, we can currently get memory past the 4GB mark; so in theory, you may be able to benefit from 64bit memory addressing.
I may be wrong, so if someone is more educated on the processors, feel free to speak up. My understanding is that the processor is still simply 32bit.
I have no knowledge on the PPC platform, so I do not know rather it was a true 64bit processor or if it is like EM64T.
Again it all comes down to memory addressing. In my opinon, 64bit (EMT64T,AMD64,etc) is all just hype. Until you have more than 4GB of RAM and actually using it, you will not benefit from it. As far as the laptop processors being 64bit, can you actually put more than 4GBs in a laptop? Last I looked you can only purchase 1GB SODIMMs (total 2GB in the current laptops). If you are concerned about future upgrades, more than likely when the time comes that you can actually get 4GB SODIMMS (totally 8GB) the current laptops will be so outdated it would not matter.
Desktops or for that matter servers, we can currently get memory past the 4GB mark; so in theory, you may be able to benefit from 64bit memory addressing.
I remember Apple making a big deal about OS X being a 64-bit OS. I think this is why so many people care.
Sixty-four bit is the future, and so it would make sense for the Core Duos to be a 64 bit processor since OS X was already on OS that could run on that. Regardless of if we would need it/use it. However, that could have been a move to keep the costs down, and in the case it really doesn't bother me, since most of wouldn't need it or use it.
shadowfayre said:
More comes from 64 bit processors than the memory addressing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit
well, the core duo's may not be 64-bit, but all of its successors will be (merom, conroe, woodcrest etc...), so it really doesn't matter. as long as the powermac stays 64-bit, (which if it uses conroe as suggested, it will be) you wont hear me complaining.
No, AMD64 and Intel's implementation of it (EM64T) are true 64 bit implementations. In other words, they have 64 bit data paths and functional units. The performance benefit is pretty limited at the moment, but there are extreme cases where performance sky rockets. One such case would be encryption, which has been shown to speed up approximately four times from running on 64 bit CPUs.shadowfayre said:
As far as the adress bus goes, this is not 64 bits wide on the AMD64 architecture. I seem ro remember that they use 42 bits for adressing, which equals about 4.4TB of adressable memory space. Should last a while.
