From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3e1162e60711160641y40a8ec9ejde7d348cb417876c@mail.gmail.com> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:41:30 -0800 From: "David Leimbach" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Current status of amd64 port? In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: Topicbox-Message-UUID: fd1620b4-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Nov 15, 2007 3:39 PM, erik quanstrom wrote: > On Thu Nov 15 18:14:18 EST 2007, vdharani@gmail.com wrote: > > this question also came up in bay area plan9 meeting. would be nice to > > know the status. i think unix adopted 32-bit earlier than other OSes. > > but for 64-bit, others have gone ahead. > > > > 64 bits is neither here nor there in a vaccuum. you want 64 bits if > a) you need more than 4GB of memory, or > a) those extra registers and direct vlong really matter for performance. > otherwise it's just a lot of extra zeros. > > it's kind of silly to run 64-bit linux on a machine with <= 4GB of memory. > Per your second a), performance does often improve quite a bit with 2x the general purpose registers. RAM is dropping in price too... why not run 64bit all the time then?