Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

64 bit vs. 32 bit

M-theory

M-theory

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 1, 2005
299
0
Pittsburgh, PA
Hi,

I apologize if this topic has been exhausted, BUT!, I thought the G5's were 64 bit, and the transition to intel was going to be from 64 to 64, but now, I am seeing that the intel macs are 32 bit? and the future chips will be 32?

please help with clearing this up...

thanks.
 
Well short term the answer is yes 32bit but in reality no the entire industry is moving to 64 bit. As it stand currently 64 bit chips dont really gain an adavatage of being 64 bit since software can not take advatage of it. OS are currently only really 32 bit so 64 bit stuff does not really work on them yet. It all hack job if they do and not really good but it OS limitaion. Now everything is moving 64 bit. XP64 is currently out there. Has driver issues due to a lack of them. Vista the users will get to choose if they want the OS to bet 64 bit or 32 bit. It slowly going there. I also rememeber intel stating they are planning on making 64 bit chips so it only logical to assume that the Apple computers are going to be going 64 bit. In the first round of chips they computer may go back to 32bit but by rev B they start going 64 bit.

I thinking in 4-5 years everything will of switch over. 4-5 years (both mac and PCs here)is about the max useable lifespan of a computer before upgrading the software is no longer a real opition. So in the next year all new computer I thinking are going to be 64 bit. 4-5 years after that software will complete it migration over ot 64 bit. with in 2-3 years there will be software requiring 64 bit running. by 4-5 years all software will be 64 bit. I predict that the next verson of M$ OS after Vista will be 64 bit only (I going to guess 2010-2011, XP lifespan I going to think was a fluke and it went a long longer that it was intended to.) Apple I think Lion may or my not be dual installible. What ever comes after lion will start the transition. After that I can see apple going to XI and going to 64 bit only. So that is about the same time fram as M$ 4-5 years the switch to 64 bit only. Which is fine since computer only really last 4-5 years.
 
Simple Answer: If you want more than 4Gb of RAM then you need a 64-bit CPU. Otherwise you don't.

Complex Answer: x64 has a larger number of general purpose registers than standard 32-bit x86. This enables software to run faster and hit main RAM less often. This is only available if the software and the OS it is running on is compiled for x64. At the moment OSX is not 64-bit (it has extensions allowing apps to access more than 4Gb of ram) so x64 mode is not/would not be used. In addition the AppKit (the basis of all Cocoa apps) is not likely to be compiled in 64-bit mode for a while as it get slower, not faster! 64-bit is not likely to be of any real use to consumer level apps for quite a while (10.6 at least).
 
wow, great, thank you for your reply and insight. I think the origianal reason for the post is the confusion about why apple would revert...but I guess I agree with you that it isn't a big deal since the software wasn't really taking advantage of the 64 bit system. The funny thing is that by the time the 'world' is moved to 64 bit, there will be talk of the new 128 bit processors, which will lead to the 64 vs. 128 bit systems. :)
 
M-theory said:
wow, great, thank you for your reply and insight. I think the origianal reason for the post is the confusion about why apple would revert...but I guess I agree with you that it isn't a big deal since the software wasn't really taking advantage of the 64 bit system. The funny thing is that by the time the 'world' is moved to 64 bit, there will be talk of the new 128 bit processors, which will lead to the 64 vs. 128 bit systems. :)
Click to expand...


I thinking it going to be a good 10-15 years after it (if not more). It was close to 15 years ago (if not more) when the jump from 32bit happen and I exepect 64 bit chips to last maybe even longer before the 128 bit jump. Computerig power double every 18 months. and the jump 64 bit allows will give that growth a lot longer than 32 bit did.
 
Timepass said:
I thinking it going to be a good 10-15 years after it (if not more). It was close to 15 years ago (if not more) when the jump from 32bit happen and I exepect 64 bit chips to last maybe even longer before the 128 bit jump. Computerig power double every 18 months. and the jump 64 bit allows will give that growth a lot longer than 32 bit did.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't expect to see 128 bit addressing. You'd have to do something like attempt to use every grain of sand on earth as a bit of memory.
 
Timepass said:
I thinking it going to be a good 10-15 years after it (if not more). It was close to 15 years ago (if not more) when the jump from 32bit happen and I exepect 64 bit chips to last maybe even longer before the 128 bit jump. Computerig power double every 18 months. and the jump 64 bit allows will give that growth a lot longer than 32 bit did.
Click to expand...

Mathematically, the change from 16-bit to 32-bit addressing offered about 65,000 times the memory capacity. 64KB -> 4GB of memory.

The change from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing offers about 4,000,000,000 times the memory capacity 4GB -> 16 exabytes (16 billion GB)

If it took 15 years from the 16-32 bit jump to need another upgrade, that means that computers needed an average of 210% memory capacity each year, compared to the previous year.

At that rate it's going to take at least 30 years before computers are going to need more than 64-bits can offer. Of course, there may be a computer revolution with quantum technology or some unforeseen technology, or possibly a leveling off in computing power during that time which could radically skew that estimate.
 
tidymeup said:
Don't the new intel chips support EM64t which are 64BIT extensions enabling the full memory addressing advantages of 64BIT ?
Click to expand...

EM64t == x64. Officially the CoreDuo (and CoreSingle) do not support this. There are rumours (see the thread in Page 2) that they do.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back