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Old 7th January 2009
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jggimi jggimi is online now
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
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I know, it's off topic, but it did come up. Here's my take on 32 vs. 64 for workstations:
The biggest benefit of 64-bit over 32-bit in a general purpose workstation environment is memory addressing improvement, the most obvious of which is being able to address more than 4GB of RAM. There are possible data transfer improvements between registers, cache, and RAM, but only if if the particular hardware being used can exploit them. There are some less obvious but helpful addressing benifits, particularly in virtual storage management. For 64-bit OSes which can run 32-bit binaries, using so-called 64-bit applications instead of 32-bit means that the application may be able to take advantage of the wider data paths, and may improve their CPU performance.
As to the comparison of various OSes and their performance, I'm not sure you'll get useful info from most of us. Since those of us who multiboot workstations do so primarily to exploit different applications, the performance mix will not be the same. You'll have to be lucky and find someone who happens to run the same app on multiple OSes for some reason.

Example:
  • I have three OSes on my 32-bit laptop, each used regularly for different applications: OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and W2K.
  • On my 64-bit laptop, I use three OSes: WXP, OpenBSD/i386, and OpenBSD/amd64. OpenBSD is booted from USB drive on this platform. The workloads are entirely different, WXP is for office automation and BSD is for compiling systems and ports, and testing, so there's really no way to make any kind of rational perception comparison, even if I/O were not a factor.
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