On 27 Sep 2003 10:08:27 -0700, jedivm@yahoo.com (Chris Huys) wrote:64bit is the only reason you would want to buy a amd these days.
AMd is still VERY competitive on the low-end. If you're looking at a
real budget system, you're choice is either the AthlonXP or the
Celeron, and the AthlonXP beats the hell out of the Celeron any day.
Of course, it's only an extra $100-$150 to move up to a P4 2.4C or
2.6C chip, which is probably worthwhile for most users (at least in
western Europe and North America, in developing countries it's a whole
other ball game).
When WIN XP 64 bit comes out, everyone will want to buy a amd64.And maybe just now the amount of 64bit applications is lacking, butthink in 3 years time, there will be hardly any application, whichwill not come out in 64bit. (and would you want to have a intel 32bitsystem at that time ?)
That's a fairly optimistic time-frame. I suspect that a lot of
applications will have been ported to 64-bits by then, but unless
Intel has an AMD64 compatible processor out by then, or AMD gets a lot
more market share, I doubt that we'll get to the point where almost
all applications are AMD64 compatible.
And yes a application written in 64bit, can easily outperform aapplication in 32bit. Think about the enormous amount of RAM that youwill be able to use with 64bit apps. Especially graphics hungry/memoryeating games written in 64bit will completely outperform his 32bitcounterpart.
Ugg! I REALLY hope that most of my applications don't need more than
2GB of memory three years from now!
Its the old performance adiagium, youre disks are slow, memory ischeap, by memory, lots of memory and run the application completely inmemory.
Great idea, but if you're application is using 2GB of memory, that
means that you have a LOT of data to read from those slow hard disks
(or even slower networks).
Most applications don't need anywhere near that amount of memory now,
and they aren't going to need that kind of memory in three years time.
The beauty of AMD64 is that you can move the few applications that
need lots of memory to 64-bits easily while still running everything
else at full speed in 32-bit mode.
desktop systems with 32bit processors are "passe".PS. About the 64bit drivers for win xp 64bit, I wouldnt worry to much.Microsoft doesnt invest in windows xp 64bit, without being sure itwill be a instant success, so driver support will be taken care of.
When it first comes out, I suspect that there will be some problems
with driver support for the less common hardware. Most hardware will
eventually move to 64-bit support, but it isn't likely to be a high
priority right out of the starting blocks. If Microsoft provides the
drivers for your hardware, then you have no problems, but MS doesn't
support all hardware.
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Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca