aximbigfan

hi., i just have a quickquestion. and yes MP i did google it.

i cant afford a 64bit os. however i do have quite a few apps that are 64bit compatible. if i have a 32bit os can i run a 64bbit appp nside the os?


chris

star882

Quote:

i cant afford a 64bit os.

http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/
http://www.debian.org/

64 bit Fedora is actually good and usable. Debian is a little buggy, but still usable. By the end of this year (or early next year), there will be a better Debian out.

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Originally Posted by A friend of mine who has a Linux kernel named after his girlfriend.

If I was VirtualBox, I could load my virtualization module into Hannah and boot up another kernel in the same address space.

Beweglich

No 64 bit apps don't run in 32 bit OS, but 32bit apps run in 64bit OS, such as Windows Xp x64(I have it triple booting with 64bit fedora and WXP)
But for any device you need 64bit drivers to use a device, which is bad for video cards, and bad for axims, I haven't gotten activesync to work yet, but the Vista Beta 2 has mobile device center which supports 64 bit syncing.

64 bit linux is great and I love it more than WINDOZE.

Kenban

The main need for a 64 bit CPU is not what most people think it is. A 32-bit CPU is limited to a total memory bus size of 4 GB. Because of how Video cards, and other onboard devices work its impossible for the system to even address 4 GB of RAM. The switch to 64-bit CPU's is to provide for the ability for a system to use more RAM. Unless you NEED more then 3.5 GB of RAM it would be useless for you to even care if you can run 64-bit programs.

star882

Quote:

The main need for a 64 bit CPU is not what most people think it is. A 32-bit CPU is limited to a total memory bus size of 4 GB. Because of how Video cards, and other onboard devices work its impossible for the system to even address 4 GB of RAM. The switch to 64-bit CPU's is to provide for the ability for a system to use more RAM. Unless you NEED more then 3.5 GB of RAM it would be useless for you to even care if you can run 64-bit programs.

Don't forget the higher floating point precision and faster 64 bit integer operations.
And of course, some programs memory map files, which could hit the 4GB limit easily.

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Originally Posted by A friend of mine who has a Linux kernel named after his girlfriend.

If I was VirtualBox, I could load my virtualization module into Hannah and boot up another kernel in the same address space.

aximbigfan

Originally Posted by Kenban

The main need for a 64 bit CPU is not what most people think it is. A 32-bit CPU is limited to a total memory bus size of 4 GB. Because of how Video cards, and other onboard devices work its impossible for the system to even address 4 GB of RAM. The switch to 64-bit CPU's is to provide for the ability for a system to use more RAM. Unless you NEED more then 3.5 GB of RAM it would be useless for you to even care if you can run 64-bit programs.

thats a common misconception. look in the 64bit wiki. thats not true at all.


chris

mikeyp

i dont use a 64bit windows

Kenban

Originally Posted by aximbigfan

thats a common misconception. look in the 64bit wiki. thats not true at all. chris

You might want to read the wikipedia page more closely. This "misconception" as you said is what I was discussing in my post. A 32 bit system can only address 2^32 memory address locations which works out to 4 GB worth of memory address space. This space is used for several things as star pointed out memory mapping files, as I said in my post on board hardware devices, and of course RAM. While memory mapping files is the fastest way to work with the file its rare for an average user to need to worry about this but is becoming more common. Hardware devices are becoming a larger problem though. I have not been paying that much attention to the new cards but I assume a quad 512 MB card system is possible. For the computer to work with the cards they are given part of the memory address space which needs to be at least as large as how much of the memory plus onboard functions can be addressed from the system. Which on a quad 512 MB computer could work out to 2 GB of memory address space that cannot be used. With a maximum of 4 GB total you don't have much left for other uses.

For the average user the extra precision that is possible with a 64-bit CPU is not needed. In most programs over 90% of the calculations don't even need 32-bit precision. The speed difference will be noticeable though in programs such as photoshop once the code takes advantage of the CPU.

Once again I stand by my original statement. The average user will not notice the difference from going to 32-bit to 64-bit today. There are speed advantages but they don't add up to much.

star882

Quote:

For the average user the extra precision that is possible with a 64-bit CPU is not needed. In most programs over 90% of the calculations don't even need 32-bit precision. The speed difference will be noticeable though in programs such as photoshop once the code takes advantage of the CPU.

In programming, it is common practice to use doubles (64 bit floating point numbers), which will cause a speed penalty on a 32 bit machine. Case in point: Fear Factor will run with higher quality on a 64 bit CPU. It can run in 64 bit emulated mode on a 32 bit CPU, but then it runs slower than real time.
Distributed.net also runs much faster on a 64 bit CPU.

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HDTV the way it should be:
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Originally Posted by A friend of mine who has a Linux kernel named after his girlfriend.

If I was VirtualBox, I could load my virtualization module into Hannah and boot up another kernel in the same address space.