On Wed, 2012-05-09 at 17:15 -0500, Lockheed wrote: > Is there any advantage in running programs within wine 64 bit over 32 > bit? Is there a speed advantage for programs like Photoshop, or movie > editors, or is it same difference? > There's a reasonable summary of 32 bit vs. 32 bit PAE vs 64 bit (X86-64) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 which says that if a given program is compiled as both 32 bit and 64 bit modes, the 64 bit version *may* be faster. My take on this is that whether there is a speed increase depends on how the compiler uses the extra registers (64 bit CPUs have 16 general purpose registers compared with the 8 in a 32 bit chip) to optimise the generated code and whether any speed-up from this optimisation offsets the performance hit from reading the bigger binary (remember that pointers are now 8 bytes compared with 4) and the consequent increase in cache misses, which may also be offset by the 64 bit chips using bigger caches. However, read that article for yourself, follow up its references and make your own mind up about it. Personally, I think it depends on the nitty gritty of what what the program is doing and whether it ever does 64 bit calculations (not many programs do). There is an obvious assumption in the above that the clock speeds, core count and the number of threads per core will be the same in both cases, in other words, if you switch from a 32bit PAE Linux distro to the same release and patch state of the corresponding 64 bit Linux distro ON THE SAME HARDWARE how much difference will you notice? If a hardware change is also involved, IOW the 64 bit chip is faster and/or has more cores and/or each core handles more parallel threads then OF COURSE the 64 bit chip will be quicker and thats without even considering the effect of an upgraded motherboard, quicker disks or a more capable graphics card. Martin
