36 or 64 bit?

[Alan Cox]

> The bit about 32bit vs 64bit was just to make the point that for many
> "everyday" tasks the advantages of 64bit are not all that great.  The

They are quite material the moment you go above about 960MB of RAM, and
get more so as RAM increases.

> flipside of that is, of course, that if you do a lot of the things
> that 64bit is better for (converting audio data between formats, for
> instance) then the disadvantages of 64bit, such as those pointed out
> by Jerry, are not that great either

In the Linux x86 world there isn't really any reason for most users to run
32bit any more that I can think of. It's different on some other CPUs as
many 64bit CPU architectures such as sparc64 are usually run with 64bit
kenrel and most userspace 32bit.

In the x86 case the extra registers and the fact the code format stays
compact tends to make 64bit a win in almost all cases, and usually a
significant win.

How much it matters depends what you do - graphics or games for example
are going to see huge wins, while most of openoffice is waiting for
keypresses and disk - neither of which are enhanced by a faster CPU in
the first place.

Many systems do a lot of graphics that benefits - from desktop icons to
font rendering ...