[mdlug] Fwd: Semi-OT: Another BIG WinVista misstep

[God of Lemmings]

<snip>
> "The cost of using 64bit operations throughout is huge. Unless a number
> is bigger than 4294967296, the size of a 32 bit binary number, most of
> the data is unused. This translates into effectively WASTING half your
> main memory, memory bandwidth to the CPU and the CPU cache. This is a
> huge performance hit."
> (from AuroraLinux FAQ)
This doesn't sound right. Ram, regardless of whether it is cache or not,
doesn't work this way, otherwise sizeof(char) would return 8 on my amd64
box instead of 1.

Also, the hypertransport bus, found on AMD64 and G5 boxes is based on 
32 bit
words (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTransport), regardless of 
architecture
size. so it couldn't be the bandwidth to the CPU either.

In fact there should be a (slight) performance gain due to having twice 
as many
general purpose registers and additional XMM registers.