64bit, useless???

Back in april, I was shoping for a new notebook. I wanted something that wouldn't be obsolete for the latest games in less than a year. 64bit and dual core technologies where just begining to make it into mainstream notebooks. I couldn't tell if dual core or 64bit was the way to go (it was too expensive to get both in one package at the tme). I decided to place my bets on 64bit and went with the z81sp. Fast forward to present day, there are a ton of games that are planned to utilize multiple threads and the only game that will see the most benefit out of 64bit is Crysis (10-15% per thread, wow). Did I make a mistake by placeing my bets on 64bit tech over dual core processors?

 

Dont' forget windows vista, which comes out next year.

 

Yes you made a mistake, but don´t panic. Most people here are advised to get a dual core laptop even though they won´t even fully utilize a single core for the next 1-2 years or so. My message is just buy what you need now and then buy a new computer in 1-x years time when you need to upgrade. You will save a lot of money by doing this instead of buying some very expensive overkill now that won´t bring any benefit until much later, when the new computers will be alot faster and cheaper than those today.

64bit is almost useless for most people while dual core is useful for those who multitask, want to use one core for the OS overhead, or use programs that are multithreaded (use both cores.)

64bit is beneficial for those who need to use more ram than 32bit OS can adress or those who are using 64bit OS.

 

There are plenty of advantages to 64 bit. But for games, multi-core currently provides more advantages. But it won't be long before games start using more than 2GB memory, and then 32-bit will start running out of steam.

 

Even when the Vista come, there is still Vista32 available(wait just a bit of longer).

Today 64 bit won't give you MUCH just because most of apps/drivers doesn't fit to 64bit yet. Unless you are playing with Matlab 64bit version, you will not get so much different. Similar thing go with Dual Cores. But OSs do utilize 2nd thread sometimes.

 

64 bit will become the standard for a long time the reasons are 64 bit floating point math is enough for serious engineering work and 64 bit will address a gigagigabytes of memory 32 will only address a giga byte.

 

You're good with 32bit for another year or two before the games developed with 'specialized' drivers to take advantage of the 64bit Vista will display a noticeable difference in both the quality and speed of gameplay. In other words, the 32bit standard has quite a few years left on it, no need to push the panic button.

 

Close.

32-bit CPU's can already do 64-bit floating point math. The main difference is in integer math. 32-bit CPU's can only do 32-bit there.
64-bit can in theory address... a hell of a lot of memory. 4 billion gigabytes. In practice, current 64-bit CPU's are limited to a couple of terabyte, I think. As far as I can remember, they "only" use 48 bits for addressing, which gives us 32 terabyte.

 

I guess we should be proud of being early adopters, as in 64-bit cpu's and PCI-express

I wonder if programming 32 bit software to take advantage of dual 32 bit processors for near 64 bit performance will ever have time to happen? Splitting 64-bit integer math between two 32-bit cpu’s should give us near 64-bit single cpu performance?

With true 64-bit cpu's, here now, we should see the same slow gradual software movement as from 16-bit to 32-bit. As today, we should still see some 16-bit software updated to just run on 32-bit or 64-bit hardware instead of a full re-writes.

I feel comfortable with my old 32-bit stuff to hold me over for a few more years if history repeats itself.

 

32bit CPU's actually generally do 80 bit floating point. I used to work for a company making 3D rendering software, and precision was quite important

Also, many 32bit CPU's have something on the order of 40bit memory controllers, so they can address more memory through hardware with an OS that understands the paging structures. It's just that the applications are limited to 32bit pointers, so they can only see a maximum of 2GB of memory (or 3GB, if you tweak things specifically at the OS level).