64-Bit Merom ADVANTAGES??

[Kaiser Phoenix]

Hi everyone,

Im very sorry if this is a really ignorant question, but I did my research I think before posting this question.

So far, I know that Merom will provide up to 20% increase in performance with the same battery life. It will have 4MB L2cache and will be 64 bit.

I know 64bit means you can have more RAM....thats about it.

Can someone explain to me what REALLY are the true advantages of say waiting to get Merom instead of buying a Yonah right now.

Thanks in advance

 

[Lollypop]

Besides more memory 64bit proecessors have 64bit registers, what that means is that the chunks of information that is in the processor can now be twice as long as in 32bit processors. Most 64bit processors also have more registers that their 32bit counterparts.

For the average consumer 64bit doesnt really mean a lot at this stage, but for scientific applications its a very big deal, not only can larger chucks of memory be addressed and larger "problems" be in memory, but due to the increase in register size and quantity more information of bigger numberical values can be processed at a single instance.

The advantage of waiting is that your machine will me more usefull as time goes by, like I said there is no real reason for a average consumer to have a 64bit processor, but as they (64bit processors) become more popular, more and more developers will take advantage of the increased register size and quantity and you will start seeing significant performance increases for consumer apps.

Another advantage is that if the OS is capable of addressing the increased amount of memory possible on a 64big processor even 32bit apps will benefit because they will now have their own 4gig chunk of memory instead of having to share it. This is asuming that you have more than 4gigs of memory.

Im not sure if the chipsets that will be used in mainstream merom systems will actually support more than 4 gigs of memory. If you look at the current iMacs and mini's, they are apparently capable of handeling a merom, but they can only address 2gigs of memory.

 

[superbovine]

This basically says what Lolly said, but gives a bit more background.

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/64bit.html

 

[Morn]

x86-64 has even more advantages. The FPU is now stackless, and the registors have been doubled in amount. This means that many applications aside from just sciencific ones can benefit. Could aide all sorts of apps like photoshop, games, video encoding.
It's a much bigger difference than between 32bit and 64bit PPC.

 

[Lollypop]

x86-64 has even more advantages. The FPU is now stackless, and the registors have been doubled in amount. This means that many applications aside from just sciencific ones can benefit. Could aide all sorts of apps like photoshop, games, video encoding.
It's a much bigger difference than between 32bit and 64bit PPC.

From this and other post I asume you know a lot of the achitecures of CPUs, as fas as I remember even with increased number of registers that x86-64 brings to the table, doesnt it still have less registers than 32 and 64bit PPC? As far as I gather the 64bit extensions on x86 is from AMD isnt it?

 

[howesey]

The Pentium chip are 48bit memory addressing IIRC. The AMD are only 64bit memory addressing, not 64 bit chips at all.

PPC5 chips are fully 64bit.

People moan that OS X is not fully 64bit. When you do research, they are monaing that the mouse pointer only uses 8bit code therefore OS X is not 64bit. My mind boggles to why a mouse point needs to have 64bit code. Something along thos lines anyway.

 

[milo]

People moan that OS X is not fully 64bit. When you do research, they are monaing that the mouse pointer only uses 8bit code therefore OS X is not 64bit. My mind boggles to why a mouse point needs to have 64bit code. Something along thos lines anyway.

Not sure where you got that idea. OSX isn't 64 bit, what it boils down to is you can't create true 64 bit apps yet. Basically you can create a command line app that's 64 bit, but apps that use the gui require kludging to make 64 bit.

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/64bit.html

"It is important to note that in Tiger, the support for 64-bit programming does not extend throughout the entire set of APIs available on Mac OS X. Most notably, the Cocoa and Carbon GUI application frameworks are not ready for 64-bit programming. In practical terms, this means that the "heavy lifting" of an application that needs 64-bit support can be done by a background process which communicates with a front-end 32-bit GUI process via a variety of mechanisms including IPC and shared memory."

That's a lot more significant than mouse code.