GEN3RIC
OSNN Senior Addict
- Joined
- 4 Apr 2005
- Messages
- 634
Interesting, I didn't know that the x64 version of XP was based off of 3.2 ....i love useless information!NetRyder said:I can't tell you for certain since I've never installed a 32-bit OS on this machine.
If you ran true 64-bit, CPU-intensive applications (and there admittedly aren't too many of those around yet), you'd definitely notice the difference. Apart from that, there might be minor perf gains due to memory management updates in the kernel. Remember that XP x64 uses NT 3.2 like Server 2003, rather than NT 3.1 which XP x86 uses. Nothing really significant though.
There's more incentive to use Vista x64 on a 64-bit machine because of a number of kernel-level security measures (better resiliency against rootkits, for example) that aren't implemented in the 32-bit kernel.
My knowledge of how 64 bit works is pretty basic I guess. I understand that 32bit pipelines are half the size of 64bit pipelines so you can fit half the data into a CPU as you can with 64bit. I do realize that if the programmers never write with 64-bits in mind, the CPU just won't use the extra 'lanes'. amirite?