Benchmark 32bit vs 64bit

[Urkle]

In reality you don't get any performance boosts with a 64bit binary.. Back at the dawn of the 386 processor (32-bit) there was a bigger improvement from 16bit to 32bit mainly because you got 32bit "moves". which when writing to video memory is a big improvement since a move take 1 clock cycle regardless of how much data you move (it's called move but really it's copy).

fast forward to nowdays and long before the 64bit desktop CPU was introduced by AMD we already had SSE, SSE2, 3DNOW, altavic (ppc), etc.. These all provided 64bit and even 128bit moves and fancier math functions as well.. Like being able to multiply two sets of numbers at the same time in one clock cycle..

So the ancillary benefit of 64bit (the bigger moves) had already been gained, so the only benefit is accessing more RAM.. which most programs don't need to address more than 4GB, and will work happily in 32bit mode.. And Yes a 32bit OS can access more than 4GB of ram. it's called PAE, just each application is limited to 4GB. (Microsoft imposed a desktop limit on 3 something GB because they most likely didn't want to mess with 3rd party driver issues. But there are ways of "fooling" windows into allowing you to access more)