chatin said:
64-bit does make things run much faster, and core duo is definitly not 64-bit.
I just replaced a mac mini 1.4 (with 1GB RAM) with a core duo mini (512MB). The core duo seemed to boot and run slower. Possibly, because of Rosetta emulation.
$800 wasted on an upgrade. (For now, until I get 2GB 667mhz memory!) No real world performance boost. (For now, until everything goes universal!)
Well, G4 in your previous mini wasn't 64-bit, either. And the entire OS, plus every single Apple program, are 100% native, no Rosetta involved. Now, if you're talking about games, or Photoshop, then correct, Rosetta would be involved (plus the graphics chip being a little slower,) would make the Intel mini slower than a PPC mini. But only for non-native apps! (Heck, my MacBook Pro is faster through Rosetta than my 1.25 GHz eMac native.)
As for 64-bit automatically making things run 'much faster'. Bollocks. In PPC, the mere addition of 64-bitness doesn't do squat. What makes the G5 way faster than G4 is the vastly superior PLATFORM. If a dual, 2.5 GHz dual-core G4 were placed on a 1/2 speed system bus (1.25 GHz,) rather than the 166MHz it topped out at, and with a dual-channel DDR2 memory controller, it would be just as fast as a G5. The
ONLY thing 64-bit adds in PPC is the ability to address more than 4 GB of memory per process. (The technology already exists to have the whole SYSTEM address over 4 GB, even on a 32-bit system, so the only benefit of 64-bit now is for more than 4 GB to an individual process.)
Now, on x86, on the other hand... There is a tangible, but slight, benefit to moving to 64-bit. This comes from the fact that the x86-64 architecture (or AMD64, or EM64T, if you prefer; they all mean the same thing,) has more registers than the 32-bit x86 architecture. This can give a small but measurable speed boost. (We're talking 5%, tops.) And this only applies for 64-bit applications. Unlike PPC's 64-bit implementation, which allows 32-bit applications to run side-by-side with 64-bit with ZERO performance hit, x86 processors must be running entirely in 64-bit mode, or entirely in 32-bit mode. This means that if you are running in 64-bit mode, software has to translate your older 32-bit apps into 64-bit datastreams and instructions. It's not MUCH of a hit, but there is a hit. (Again, about 5%.) This means that running a 64-bit OS, you GAIN up to 5% running 64-bit apps, but LOSE up to 5% running 32-bit apps.
And note that on both of these, 5% appears to be the MAX performance difference (aside from badly written 32-bit programs in 64-bit OS, which lose more.) So even on x86, adding 64-bit won't make that big a difference. (I have a 64-bit Windows machine, and dual boot 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, mostly for testing purposes. I have yet to 'feel' any difference in speed, even doing processor intensive things.)
We might see more of a performance boost in Mac OS, simply because of refinements to the OS since Apple can write to a specific set of hardware, but I have a feeling that the 'desktop' Mac OS will stay 32-bit for the forseeable future, simply because they can't alienate all the Yonah purchasers. (Again, unlike PPC, where you can have both 32-bit and 64-bit compatibility side by side easily, on x86, it's an either/or thing, and takes a bit of work to compile for both.)
