On 08/24/11 12:05 AM, Kenneth Porter wrote: > As someone who coded in assembler for PDP-11, PDP-10, 8086, and 68000, I > have to report that more registers is a Very Good Thing. Just how many more > registers do you get when going to 64-bit? indeed, thats the main performance gain, other than the increased address space. in fact, for RISC architectures such as SPARC, Power, MIPS, where there were already sufficient registers, and for which the 64 bit extensions were virtually identical to the existing 32 bit base architecture, going to 64 bit code for most applications that dont need additional linear address space is actually a performance /penalty/ due to the increase in size of the code base for the longer offsets and addresses. On the x86_64, there are 16 64bit registers instead of the 8 16/32 bit of the 8086/386 instruction set architecture (of those 8 or 16, two are the dedicated stack pointer and base pointer registers, leaving really only 6 or 14 general purpose registers). -- john r pierce N 37, W 122 santa cruz ca mid-left coast _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos