Pros and cons of going 64-bit
Deb Shinder
Published: 21 Aug 2006 15:10 BST
The wave of the future is undoubtedly 64-bit technology. 64-bit processors have been pretty common in high end servers since 2004 and now 64-bit desktop machines are being offered by most PC vendors. Since 64-bit CPUs can handle more memory and larger files, and 64-bit processors are backwardly compatible with 32-bit operating systems and applications, it seems obvious that 64-bit hardware provides you with the ultimate in scalability. If you're in the position of buying new computers in the near future, you may be wondering whether it's worth the expense to go 64-bit. Let's take a look at some of the pros and cons.
What is 64-bit processing anyway?
When we talk about "bits" as applied to computer processors, we're talking about the maximum-size number that the processor's registers can store and handle at one time. This means a 64-bit processor can handle numbers that are twice as large as those handled by a 32-bit processor. Practically speaking, what does this mean to you?
Advantages of 64-bit systems
Just as the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit PCs in the 1980s greatly increased computing power, the leap from 32-bit to 64-bit will double the amount of data that a processor can handle on each clock cycle.
A big advantage of the 64-bit system is its ability to support more system memory. Most computer users know that programs run faster (and you can run more programs simultaneously) if you add more RAM. Unfortunately, 32-bit chips can generally only address 4GB of memory.
There was a time when 4GB of RAM seemed like more than enough memory for any computer, but that's no longer true with today's memory-hungry applications. And it's not just heavy gamers who need lots of memory. The popularity of running multiple servers as virtual machines on a single physical computer has vastly increased the memory needs of those machines, and even on workstations, memory-intensive graphics and video applications, Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs, computer simulation and modelling software and the like are pushing the upper limits of that 4GB ceiling.
64-bit processors, on the other hand, can address enormous amounts of memory — up to 16 exabytes. To put that number into perspective, it's equal to over 16,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 16 billion gigabytes. You can be pretty sure that by the time you need more memory than that, the 64-bit system you buy today will be long gone. Of course, the amount of memory you can install in a system is limited by its motherboard, the number of memory slots it has and the size of memory modules that are available. Many current 64-bit motherboards will accommodate 8 to16GB or more of RAM.
By allowing for the addressing of more RAM, 64-bit processing can greatly improve video encoding and decoding, CAD, VMs and some other applications. But does more bits mean better performance? Well, maybe and maybe not. You'll see a performance increase for applications that use 64-bit integers, but don't expect most of your apps to run any faster than they do on your 32-bit systems. And your web browser will still be limited by your Internet connection speed, your word processing program will still be bottlenecked by how fast you can type, and so on. In fact, there can be a slight performance decrease caused by the switch to a 64-bit processor, because the larger memory address pointers take up twice as much room in the cache.
What's available in 64-bit?
There's little doubt that 64-bit computing will eventually make 32-bit systems obsolete. Major hardware and software vendors are all headed in that direction. Intel shipped the 64-bit Itanium for high-end servers way back in 2001. AMD introduced its 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64 processors in 2003…
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