Piggy said:
I'm wondering why there are so many 64 bit pc's on the market if there is
little in the way of software and driver support.
Well, it's a hardware manufacturing thing. It costs many billions of
dollars to build a fab to make the chips. If you know (before you spend the
many billions of dollars) that you are going to eventually be fab'ing 64-bit
chips, then that is what you design the fab to support. So that the money
isn't wasted on a line that can't produce currently marketable products, you
make the new chips backward-compatible with current software. Consequently,
the hardware tends to hit the market and wait for the software to catch up.
On the other hand, converting software to 64-bits is trivial. Just hire a
few buck-fifty-an-hour programmers overseas and assign them to the task.
So then one has to wonder why there is not more 64-bit software on the
market? That boils down to supply and demand. There is nothing in the
64-bit software that can't be done with 32-bit software. So demand (and
thus supply also) is a bit lacking.
I was considering going to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor but should I
just stick with cheaper 32bit processors?
Anything you build today should be dual core. If you build dual core as you
should, then the question of 32 bit or 64 bit should be moot. AFAIK, there
is no dual core 32-bit processor. But I could be wrong on that. -Dave