[aklug] Re: 32 vs 64 bit

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 10:29:42AM -0800, Greg Madden wrote:
>
>
> On Friday 22 October 2010 06:50:14 Christopher Howard wrote:
>
> > And I've been running 64-bit OS's happily, for several years now. In my
> > mind, 32-bit processors (along with single core chips) are legacy
> > technology. We should encourage development of more powerful 64-bit
> > software by running operating systems that actually are capable of running
> > them.
>
> I can't imagine working with single core, even though most apps are not multi
> threaded , running multiple apps, or even vm's are common.
>
> The bigest improvement will be multi threading apps. I built a new box, lots of
> resources, most things I do take relative amounts of time because they are bound
> to one cpu.
>

Making an app multi-threaded is easier now with the interpreted languages. In Ruby, I converted my latest app over to multi-threading with about a half-hour of work. This made a huge difference on performance (50%+) because most of the user time was spent waiting for network i/o.

This probably never be able to justify replacing this cheap dual-core netbook of mine (two years on Gentoo and still running strong) but if I did, I'd probably get one of those nifty i7 machines with 8 virtual cores.

-- 
Christopher Howard
frigidcode.com
theologia.indicium.us
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