[mdlug] Time to jump to 64-bit?

[Jeff Hanson]

I've been using Ubuntu Hardy 64-bit and the only problem I've
encountered was the Sun Java plugin not working in Firefox.

On 10/29/09, Michael Corral <micorral at comcast.net> wrote:
> 2009-10-29, Monsieur Ingles, Raymond a ecrit:
>> I understand that the 64-bit instruction set has extra registers and
>> such, which can provide a boost of a few percentage points in some
>> tasks. But I've heard that there's problems with Flash support, and I
>> use Wine and some emulator stuff to run older Windows games. Overall, I
>> don't know if the benefits of 64-bit would outweigh the drawbacks in my
>> case.
>
> I've heard that it makes a noticeable difference for video recording
> and editing. In my experience it helped speed up compiling LaTeX files
> and running some operations in R, i.e. mathematically intensive tasks.
> For example, try printing all 12,978,189 digits of the 46th Mersenne
> prime (2^43112609 - 1) to a file using the GMP library; it's way faster
> in 64-bit than in 32-bit (see code at the end of this message).
>
> As others have said, you won't notice any difference for most things.
> And if you have the disk space then installing 32-bit libs won't be
> an issue. Personally, I tried 64-bit for a while then went back to
> 32-bit, since I didn't feel like installing extra libs just to make
> 32-bit stuff work. The advantages of 64-bit weren't great enough.
>
> Michael
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> /* mersenne.c */
> #include <stdio.h>
> #include <stdlib.h>
> #include <gmp.h>
> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
>     char *endptr;
>     unsigned long int p = strtoul(argv[1],&endptr,10);
>     mpz_t M, powerof2, one, two;
>     mpz_init(M); mpz_init(powerof2);
>     mpz_init_set_str(one,"1",10);
>     mpz_init_set_str(two,"2",10);
>     mpz_pow_ui(powerof2,two,p);
>     mpz_sub(M,powerof2,one);
>     gmp_printf("%Zd",M);
>     return 0;
> }
> ------------------------------------------
> $ gcc -o mersenne mersenne.c -lgmp
> $ time ./mersenne 43112609 > M46
>
> real    0m17.226s
> user    0m16.874s
> sys     0m0.163s
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