64 bit pros & cons Of particular interest to many people on this forum may be the increased performance for encryption software Sorry about the source only being Wikipedia but was the only pace where I could find things listed.
64bit does nothing worse than 32bit. 64bit has the potential to be much faster than 32bit. You can see benchmarks with programs that do things like encryptions. You can see benchmarks for OS's like Linux Ubuntu 32bit and 64bit. They will tell you the same thing. I believe 32bit gives access to 4 registers and 64bit gives access to 11. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong there. EDIT: Apparently it's 8 and 16.
Eh, barely. The RAM usage is caused by Long Bloat (or is it Float Bloat? I can't even remember) and you can optimize for it, which won't reduce the RAM but can at least take advantage of the increased RAM - nearly as good. I'd also say 2GB is plenty for Windows 7 and certainly Windows 8, which uses ~240MB less on startup (currently) on a 1GB system. And overall performance should increase because you don't have to swap as much when you can address large amounts of information at once rather than splitting it, addressing it, swapping out, and addressing the next piece and so forth in that manner. Not to mention the blatant performance increases of having double the register size - something not inherent in 64bit computing but inherent in the architecture. Double registers leads to significant performance improvements and you can utilize them very well with little tricks like hyperthreading. Looking at applicaitons like emulators, which are often available in 32bit as well as 64bit, you can see major performance improvements moving from 32bit to 64bit. There are also performance benefits when moving large files such as movies. There are overall beneifts certainly (as mentioned before) with Linux Ubuntu. I don't have the benchmarks right now and I'm kind lazy to search but I'm sure you can find them. And again, 64bit allows for patchguard and 64bit ASLR as well as a generally more "random" number generator for increasing entropy, which I think we can agree can be fairly important to security.
Actually do you happen to have some kinda RAM usage comparison for 32bit and 64bit on a vanilla Windows 7? I'd appreciate that a lot.
I don't know if there are any actual restraints in 64bit that aren't caused by patchgaurd/ software just not being written for it. 64bit Sandboxie is very nearly as strong as 32bit Sandboxie. That's just one example. While you may have some 3rd party software unable to provide "full" security (yet) your OS will be more secure if it's 64bit and supports ASLR.
Without a doubt 64bit. With ram being cheap these days and the amount of ram required by many different applications and games its a must have for me.
http://www.stanford.edu/~blp/papers/asrandom.pdf And one important note: Stumbled upon this while learning about Buffer Overflow attacks and Return to LibC
And thaaaaaat's why I want Chrome to hurry up and hit 64bit. It's basically a guarantee that the Vupen exploit (which is in my opinion likely already gone) would no longer be relevant. You can programatically bruteforce but it would take forever and be way easier to detect.
day-to-day use. still on x32. x64 systems are currently not that common in my country plus upgrading gets almost as expensive as getting a brand new system
IMO you are not missing much except extra headaches. The security might be better with x64, and some programs will actually benefit from it if you use them. However, my experience with x64 is that it is not as streamlined as x32 at all. It isn't really x64 fault, nothing wrong with it, only that the past being x32 does not always move into x64 easily. In 5 years that will be a distant memory most likely, but today, I really wish x32 could utilize more RAM as I would switch back in a moments notice. Sul.
Most popular applications are ported or are in the process of being ported. I haven't really run into any issues from running 64bit though. There are security benefits in terms of patchguard as well as significantly more random ASLR/other things that rely on randomization. And there can be performance benefits from not only basic 64bit coding but also the x64 architecture using twice as many registers.
I realize that Win7 64-bit can make use of more RAM than Win7 32-bit, but how much more RAM does the 64-bit version actually require to perform as well as the 32-bit version (if that makes any sense)?
64bit applications (and OS) will use more RAM. It's not that they need more RAM but when you store variables in RAM they sometimes will end up taking a bit more space than they need. So depending on the program this can lead to no extra RAM or in some weird impossible case I suppose it could double the RAM usage. I doubt any program is going to be either of those cases, most will use a little bit more. There is no set amount and it's entirely program-specific. Basically, if I wrote a huge program with only Long variables I'd double RAM usage with 64bit.
I would say "many" popular applications are now native 64bit, but not most, at least not many of the ones I use. This doesn't even delve into games, of which most are x32 still to my knowledge (again, at least ones I play, even new ones). Performance wise, yes, some applications benefit. However, there seems to be some assumption that x64 is faster/better than x32, and that is, again, not really true across the board. For what I do, and most people I know who don't encode videos etc, there is no visual difference. I have 16gb of ram, and running BF3, which is pretty demanding, only 4gb of my memory ever gets used. True, if I had x32, it would be all that I had available (after the video card gets its memory addressed), but there is not appreciable difference that I can tell. Not saying x64 is crap, it isn't. Just that it isn't seamless yet, whereas x32 with its long use is. Sul.
Very few games are 64bit. Games are more interested in getting the game out and compatible rather than fast. For certain things (parsing, encrypting, decrypting) there are blatant performance benefits when a program is built properly for 64bit. These are things we do quite often. It's not really like "omg we need 64bit for performance" it's more like "64bit can definitely be faster in some situations and can be more secure in some situations." I agree that it isn't seamless yet. Only recently did we even start seeing 64bit browsers pop up. Many many applications just haven't moved to it yet - but many applications are in the process of moving.
As I see it, many of us have a substantial investment in 32-bit applications and may not be able to afford upgrading them to their 64-bit counterparts. In that situation I can't help but wonder what's to be be gained with 64-bit Windows?
Like I said, what's to be gained is improved security as well as performance increases. The issue is that you can no longer run 16bit programs and there can be increases in RAM usage.
