Submitted by “Testing 64-bit performance is still a somewhat dicey proposition. Major benchmarks are either lacking, or don’t work properly. For example, SYSmark 2007 simply doesn’t run on a 64-bit OS (Vista or XP). And while there’s now a 3ds Max 9 SPECapc benchmark, the benchmark crashes consistently with a scripting error before it completes when running on 3ds Max 9 64-bit under Vista 64-bit. On the other hand, there are more 64-bit applications and benchmarks now. That system-sapping game, Crysis, ships with a 64-bit client. 3ds Max 9, Lightwave 9, POV-Ray, and the Cinebench rendering benchmark all have 64-bit versions. Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage offers a 64-bit version of that Vista-centric, synthetic test. On top of that, anyone using 64-bit Vista will still be running a lot of 32-bit applications. So we benchmarked some of those as well. Let’s take a look at the benchmarks and test system.”
Apparently your productivity stays the same.
And I quite like it. It so far runs 32 bit apps well, and it really does seem faster than 32-bit Vista for most everything I do. It also further convinces me that all the whining on the web about Vista is a bit overblown. I say that having already installed SP1 though. FWIW, I run VMWare Workstation, MS Office, and some proprietary business apps on here.
hmmm, so you experience of 64bit is that it is faster than the same machine running 32bit ?
that is strange.
even the guys benchmark results prove otherwise.
I remember the big hoo-ha when everyone moved from 32bit from 16bit.
16bit was always way faster.
clock speed versus clock speed, the smaller the bit size, the faster the processing. in theory….
I should say my experience is hardly scientific, but rather “seat of the pants”. But yes, it does feel faster.
Thing is that now there is more to the move then just the bitness. There are 8 more integer registers and I think there are 8 more xmm registers too. On an architecture that has always been register starved that has to be useful.
Another interesting tidbit is that in 64 bit mode the preferred size is still 32 bits. Or that is what I get from the assembly documentation. The thing that I liked is the chance to break the old function call convention so that it hit memory less frequently.
Of course, these are all details. The real proof is in the numbers, and the numbers don’t look pleasant. Does anyone have Linux 32 vs 64 bit numbers?
Actually the “32bit preference” is microsoft specific.
They chose a different way from everyone else in interpreting a ‘long’ in ‘c’. Microsoft chose 32bit, everyone else does 64bit for these values
As for coding 64-bit allows you to be lazy more than anything. With 32bit you have to make sure to page in and out datasets. With 64bit you can just memory map the entire thing and access it as you will. Take for example your nice digital photograph collection which very likely exceeds 2GB. Also allows mapping of video files. All of this mapping bypasses library copies from kernel space into user space and also allows the kernel to handle any and all thread access locking on the inputs without having to do any of it yourself. And there’s more than just that.
Honestly under linux I haven’t run a 32bit system for about 4 years now (just after introduction of the athlon64). At work just after the opteron was released we immediately installed 64bit fedora on one of the new server boxes and never installed a 32bit linux os after that.
No problem with VMware drivers?
I’ve been running Vista x64 (4GiB RAM) at work since I saw it gave me almost 500MiB more memory to VMware server.
The only thing I mustn’t do is install SP1 or specific updates as it’ll break the setting to disable signed driver checks.
Just about all programs installed and running are 32bit and I haven’t had any problems with these. Exception is the latest VMware Virtualcenter client, that one refuses to install.
this is VMWare Workstation, not VI3 installed on my Vista desktop. My VI3 client to access our ESX servers resides on my 32-bit XP equipped Thinkpad.
It is hardly surprising considering only a small percentage of programs on vista are 64 bit native or even offer 64bit binaries.
There isn’t a market for x64 apps, but at least some could offer 64bit binaries. Decent 64 bit codec support is nowhere to be seen. Until mainstream apps (that are not from microsoft) start taking proper advantage of x64 one will not see any significant performance increases IF there are any to be had. With a 20% x64 vista market share, software makers are at the mercy of the market, so they wont commit. Clearly this is one of the advantages of open source.
I blame the lack of 64bit flash in linux on vista and adobe, who seem to be too lazy to even try.
At least on Linux you have the flexibility to get Flash anyway.
I think there’s something special I had to modify and/or install, but it runs fine on my x64 Debian box.
Attention websites, please stop assaulting my eyes (and brain) with interface overload. How many links does one page need? Of course, despite having a zillion ads, there apparently wasn’t enough room to fit more than a couple paragraphs of actual content per page.
In any case, I felt like maybe I was missing out because of running x86 instead of x64, but it looks like I can sleep better now.
That site is pretty egregious. I really need to figure out how to just obliterate sidebars. Bottom bars. Top bars. Floaty things.
So many blogs and sites seem to be completely crudded up with pointless RSS feeds to external sites, promotion buttons, and that’s before you get to the advertisements I’m never going to click (not that I see most of them, thanks to plugins). The huge blotches on the bottom, the “featured offers” are just awful. Yeah I’ll jump right on that “free white paper” there.
The actual content on this site, the lead page, anyway, appears to be, by rough estimate, about 15-20% of the screen real estate. It gets a little better on subsequent pages, but still.
Anyway, was mildly interested in the subject but don’t have the energy to read that site.
The tests are a bit questionable themselves.
Looking at the time it takes to render the Lightwave scene, the data must be so simple and small that it’s not representative of real life numbers. I remember a comparison a couple of years ago where going from Lightwave 32bits to 64 bits in Win XP allowed x3 gains, going from 9 hours to 3 hours, and even though the freelance artist’s scenes were intended for TV, I can’t imagine 2008 shots would be simpler than what he was producing.
I’m not sure either it’s Vista, or if Intel’s version of amd64 isn’t up to par with AMD’s, but a comparison between i386 and amd64 Linux on an AMD CPU showed in average 20% gains with no noticeable slowdowns whatever the application.
Edited 2008-04-02 21:44 UTC
With ram prices being as low as they are I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to 6 gigs of ram with vista 64. I kept hearing all these horror stories of incompatible apps and drivers and was worried that the ram i got would be wasted if i went back to vista/xp 32.
It went rather well, I found drivers for all my hardware and every app but one (gametap do to drm) worked just as it did on x32
A few things surprised me and only found out about when I installed x64
1) Vista comes with 32bit and 64bit versions of IE and WMP and by default will use the 32bit version. So things like Adobe Flash and divx codec work as they should for the most part* THe codec problem with x64 has to do with 64bit version of WMP and Media center as well as explorer uses the 64bit codecs for thumbnails. 32bit codec like divx work fine when useing 32bit players and converters (there is a 64 bit version of xvid that can play many divx files)
2)You don’t have to use 64 bit versions of programs. I was worried most about this sense there are very few 64 bit apps out and the fear of running into bugs with 32 bit, however when I noticed that 32 bit ran fine I got over my fear so to speak and just grab 32 bit versions without thinking about it. With some rare exceptions the stability and performance of 32 bit apps is the same under x64 as x32. in fact you can treat the system as if it was 32 bit and not even realize that the os was 64bit and still gain an advantage in the amount of ram when multitasking
I think they should have tested on more than just the one Core2Duo. I have seen in the past that AMD CPUs get a greater boost than their Intel counterparts. I have heard that some of the Core’s tweaks get disabled in 64-bit mode, such as “macrofusion”. Until I hear otherwise I think I’ll keep mine Core2Duo in 32-bit mode.
All I could find at a glance was the oldest article I was thinking of: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1860516,00.asp)
Here is a less exhuastive test suite run on Linux that shows a Phenom doing all around better in non gaming and just very slightly worse in gaming. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=998&num=3
that XP is faster than Vista, no matter if it runs on 32 or 64 bit computers.
Actually, the reality (for me anyway) is that I can run just as many VMs under 64 bit Vista as I can under 64-bit Ubuntu, and as far as other apps I am equally productive under either OS.
Yesterday afternoon I decided to install Vista 64-bit on an HP laptop, and was able to get just as many 24bit/96khz audio tracks under Vista as I am under XP, with just as many plug-ins running. Encoding from MPEG to Quicktime is quite fast as well.
So my personal reality is that the internet lemming hatred of Vista is a bit unwarranted.
Just my opinion though. =)
Disclaimer: I didn’t read the article linked here.
Software that properly takes advantage of 64-bit support in math-related routines can experience drastic performance improvements.
There are several distributed computing applications that I have run in the recent past (few months to a year) that demonstrate a drastic improvement in performance when they are running on a 64-bit OS. Certainly these are applications pushing the way beyond standard usage of a computer into the realm of giant numbers… so it’s a corner case – but it doesn’t change that fact that some processing can very definitely benefit from the bump.
example:
http://abcathome.com
and
I have personally seen this difference in speed on my AMD64 X2 running both 32-bit XP and 64-bit XP.
edit: (added disclaimer)
Edited 2008-04-02 22:13 UTC
Wow that’s an HUGE claim! Imagine if that were the truth, the world would be turned upside down, the most ‘micro-pc’ would be able to run vista ultimate without any issues. Your ENTIRE computer, is just instantly THREE TIMES faster…
I’ve never heard such an outrageous claim in my life!
They are talking about a particular piece of software ABC@Home, not the OS. Read the quote in your own post, it says:
“14 February 2007
The 64bit version for linux has been put into stable. It’s about 3x or more faster than the 32bit version. A windows version still is giving some trouble, but should appear later on.”
Exactly.
But without a 64-bit OS – you won’t be running too much 64-bit optimized software
My entire point was – there are definite reasons to use a 64-bit version of Windows over a 32-bit version, but it requires the right applications.
I believe the abc@home math uses primarily integer math, which benefits greatly from 64-bit support.
Back when 64bit linux first came out I had a delaunay triangulation library which for some reason required 64bit calculations (I think I did the circle test or something like that with 64bit ints, honestly I can’t remember). As I recall the algorithm saw something like a 4x boost with the math. Definitely worth it.
I really wish nowadays that windows had gotten to the point that 32bit could be ignored, but Microsoft has been very late to the party (well they ARE a marketing company, not a tech one). At least Microsoft has joined the 1990’s with their thread support under vista. It’s just lame that the OS eats as much ram as it does for doing nothing. You’d think they were using firefox to run their base OS or something.
From the marketing standpoint one would think it did not even exist. Because MS does not market it, if they do have a plug it is very, very small.
On the other hand, Red Hat Linux is in my opinion way ahead in the 64 bit realm, really all of the Linux distro’s are accelerating out past MS in this area. Why I honestly believe it is because they do not really have any competition in this area and they will let it slip by then try to conquer the competitor as they have done in the past.
How many ‘pre-loaded’ 64 bit Windows boxes have you ever seen in a store much less on a website? If you do find it most of the time it is a tiny section and it almost as if it does not even exist.
Being a Linux Admin, about 90% of all of the production servers are RHEL5.1 64 because the servers have 32gig of memory and the setup can utilize the hardware in a more efficient way. I just do not understand why MS has missed the boat on this, trying to find 64 bit on their site is like trying to find a ad for Red Hat…
Easy: Microsoft is first and foremost about marketing and trying to chase new markets, not spend money on markets they already totally own.
Also there’s that little problem with Microsoft really being at the mercy of the hardware guys for device driver development compared with the centralization of the hardware drivers in the OS code. Pretty big boat anchor for them to overcome.
They didn’t feel forced into supporting it so quickly and they’ve had bad technical problems trying to port their hacked up x86 code base. So effectively yes, they pretty much gave a huge lead to their competitors in the area which they’re still very weak: servers and high performance computing. With the extreme high prices they charge in that area with really abysmal performance (especially IO) I just don’t see them getting that market in the near future.
Edited 2008-04-03 04:06 UTC
Um,
Win Server 2008 is primarily 64-bit. Exchange isn’t even supported for production deployments on 32-bit OSes. We’ve also supported Itanium, long before the x64 architecture came out. I wouldn’t underestimate Microsoft when it comes to 64-bit adoption.
I don’t.
I just see that high performance 64bit apps on 8 cores same machine runs about 50% faster on linux than windows (server 2008) with the intel compiler. gcc vs visual studio runs about the same.
All I can say is that at least vista/server 2008 seems to be stable with the high performance threaded apps.
I don’t fully understand your quote. Are you saying that with the intel compiler, an app runs 50% faster, but with gcc the app runs the same as Windows? Or are you saying that with intel and gcc on Linux, the performance is comparable and 50% faster than Windows?
If it’s just faster with the intel compiler, then I don’t think this is a Linux versus Windows thing at all, but perhaps a more aggressive use of special instructions and registers. If it’s not a matter of the compiler, then I’d like to see the results and try it out myself.
From what I’ve learned through observation, for a high performance application the best thing an OS can do is offer fast paths and then get out of the way.
Edited 2008-04-04 07:46 UTC
When you run a 32bit app under a 64bit OS, the 32bit app can use the complete 4GB for its own address space, while it can only use 2GB of ram on a 32bit OS since the upper half is reserved for the operating system.
At work, I am running .NET applications in 32bit mode even on a 64bit machine because the 32bit code generation is currently better optimized. But at least they can use 4GB of ram, which makes a big difference.
Making a 32bit binary “large address aware” can also have performance advantages for some recent games.
Was not in having x64 only for Vista. Having an x86 version around and being rammed down everyones throat through OEM’s has really made a bad impression of how capable Vista can be.
MS should have bitten the bullet and just released x64 Vista in 2 or 3 versions, Basic, Business, Kitchen Sink. This would have made Vista a hell of a lot more of a success. I like Vista x64 and much more than OS-X for Graphic Design and Media work I do.
Used the same apps on XP x86, Vista x64 and OS-X and Vista x64 seems the nicest environment out of these from a usability stand point.
Unfortunatly the apps I sue are not available for Linux so no comparisons can be made here.
I agree completely. Even on 2GB of RAM 64-bit runs great. MS should have just concentrated on how well the OS handles 32-bit apps (which it already does quite well) instead of worrying about having 6 different versions of the OS (is that right? 6?)
Edited 2008-04-03 13:43 UTC