Intel concedes server business to AMD ;-)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert Myers
  • Start date Start date
Bill said:
More to the point, do any of your applications actually benefit from 64
bit? Outside of the raw performance of the CPU, do you have something
which benefits from the big address space?

Web, news, mail, and DNS servers tend to be many small processes (or
threads) which have a small address space. They run out of i/o before
anything else.
Click to expand...

Sigh. Yet another who thinks that addressing more RAM is all
there is to AMD64.

For many apps, the primary benefits of AMD64 are
1.) Twice as many registers
2.) The non-SSE registers have doubled from 32 bits wide to 64.

A *lot* of apps can benefit from more and wider registers.
 
Rob said:
Sigh. Yet another who thinks that addressing more RAM is all
there is to AMD64.

For many apps, the primary benefits of AMD64 are
1.) Twice as many registers
2.) The non-SSE registers have doubled from 32 bits wide to 64.

A *lot* of apps can benefit from more and wider registers.
Click to expand...

There are also some other benefits: consider a case where your dealing with
software oriented towards HDD's, the largest size you can use in a register
with ia32 is 32 bits hence 4 gig. Sure there's a 64 bit type but its a
structure of 2 32 bit vars, with x86_64 now that can go away and integral
64 bit vars can be used.
Integer Math can be done in 2 registers instead of 4 for operations
resulting in greater than 32 bits.
How about holding/passing an IPv6 address?
It seems the longer you think about it the more you can come up with, it
just takes some thought.

Eric
 
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