rob.rice

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I agree every thing is going 64bit sooner than later
IF you don't have 64bit data paths to the HDD,vedio and memory stick with 32bit
64bit distro on such a machine will slow down things a lot

johnsfine

There are no 64 bit data paths actually to the HDD. Maybe there is a 64 bit data path to the interface (on the motherboard) for the HDD. That wouldn't matter much. HDD's transfer slower than ram anyway, plus the HDD times are usually dominated by seek and latency, not transfer.

64 vs. 32 paths to video might make a big difference for gaming or maybe even for just playing videos at higher resolution. But none of that would factor into the 32 bit vs 64 bit distribution choice. A 64 bit program has no more need for a better data path to video than a 32 bit program. Data sizes inside the program have little connection to the data sizes between the cpu and various other motherboard components.

32 vs. 64 bit paths between CPU and ram might factor a tiny bit into a 32 bit vs. 64 bit distribution choice. 64 bit programs are likely to have slightly more L2 cache misses and those L2 cache misses are likely to be resolved faster with 64 bit paths to ram. But that difference would be subtle. Either a 32 bit or 64 bit distribution would be slower with 32 bit instead of 64 bit paths to ram. The amount more slower that the 64 bit distribution might be is probably not big enough to measure.

There have been mentions in this thread of driver or other compatibility issues with PAE vs. driver or other compatibility issues with 64 bit. Both have been seen. Both are rare. The discussion of such problems in threads like this seems to far exceed the first hand reports by anyone who has actually experienced such problems. That doesn't seem to be a reasonable factor to try to consider when deciding between PAE and 64 bit for an ordinary system with 4GB or more of ram.

marozsas

As far as I known, internal buses (or paths as you called it) does not have any relation with the processor.
For instance, PCI Express could have 1, 2, 14, 8, 16 or 32 bits width and are called in technical specs as "lanes", and x16 is the most common size. This is true for 32 or 64 bits CPUs.

North bridges and south bridges widths are fixed by design and chipset. Again, nothing to do with the CPU. In fact, they work independently from the CPU, this is the beauty of this design and this is why it can make a motherboard have a better performance than another one. Here, technologies like HyperTransport are used to speed up the data transfer in the North and South bridges. Again, this don't have anything with the CPU.

64 bit CPS can process/move data in chucks twice in size than 32 bits processors in the same time. So CPU intensive applications like cryptography programs, data compress programs, video encode/decoder works faster on 64 bits cpus.

Pure I/O like hard disk I/O (not counting soft RAID), audio/video (not counting uncompressing/decode) and any serial/usb/parallel/etc I/O are not affected by CPU size.

I_didnt_know_that

Despite contrary opinions, I think you only need to look at what you are using the computer for.
It it's for web-browsing, office applications and other 'normal' low-tech usage, I would go with a mainstream 32bit install. I don't know about you, but I've come to Linux to get away from constant upgrades and hacks needed to make things work.
At the moment, most apps are written for the 32bit world. I don't know anything about the programmers underlying work, but some seem to work ok on 64bit and others don't. It appears that those apps that don't work under 64bit fall mainly into the every-day usage sort.
If you just want to get things done - I'd stick to 32bit for a year or two yet. As I said, I'm just a user, not an expert.
Cheers,

smeezekitty

sinces there is millons (?) of apps for win/linux for 32 bit that dont behave as well on 64, stick with 32bit.

AlucardZero

Name 10

johnsfine

I agree with you. But just in case we're wrong, I'll name one. Let's see who can name nine more:

Google Earth on 64 bit Debian based Linux distributions. I'm pretty sure it is just an installation problem. If installed correctly, the 32 bit Google Earth would probably perform just fine on 64 bit Debian. However, it seems to be hard enough to get it installed right (vs. trivial to install it right in 32 bit Debian) that the distinction between "behave" and install is unfair. For the ordinary unskilled end user, it works in 32 bit Debian and not in 64 bit.

Even if someone names nine more, I'm still happy with my 64 bit Mepis system.