Since 99 of applications used are 32-bit, I can't see how they run slower than 64-bit. Only applications that really need 64-bit are CAD applications and A/V applications. Most of these are running directly on the GPU of your video adapter. I have been programming since the 1980s. I had SMP running on a Tyan Tomcat IIID board with dual Intel 133 MHz CPUs. SMP and SMT help more than 64-bit. Almost all programs used today are single thread applications that are 32-bit. They don't need to run SMP or SMT because they really don't have that much to do. SMP is Symmetric Multiprocessing and SMT is Symmetric multithreading. I have played with both for 20+ years. Other than SQL servers and a few other server apps, SMP and SMT are not really used either. 32-bit in Windows runs in its own memory space. It crashes, it does not affect any other application running. 64-bit is not really used by most programmers. My wife is a web programmer. She was having problems with 64-bit libraries crashing her apps. She recompiled back to 32-bit and it solved her problems. 64-bit allows users to have more RAM. I find it funny how many computers have 2 GB of RAM running 64-bit. I run 16GB at home for CAD and Photoshop. I might go to 32GB on my next build for some of my CAD apps to stop paging on larger designs.

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Holy wall of text...

1) How do you know 99% of all applications used are 32-bit? Where did you get that number? I find it fascinatingly presumptuous. I suggest you investigate some of your programs, see how many of the ones you use on a daily basis are actually 32-bit. If you're running on Linux, you'd probably be surprised. I'm still looking for one on my system...thunderbird, google chrome, firefox, konsole, they're all 64-bit.

2) What on earth does exposure have to do with optimization on modern processors??? Try it, see what you find. Most of my tests have shown a 10-20% increase in speed when running in 64-bit on a 64-bit processor. You can also Google it, comparisons are all over the place, eg:
http://www.viva64.com/en/k/0003/
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...1404_x64&num=1
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/wi...t-performance/

Again, wrong. How limited is your view of the modern world that you think the only programs that need more than 4 GB of RAM or need to interface with >4 GB files are CAD and A/V? Simulation, assimilation, modeling, numerical analysis, games...hell, even my WEB BROWSER uses >4 GB on occasion, and yes, it's 64-bit.

When did we start talking about Windows?

Again, where are you getting these "facts"? Every programmer I know works in 64-bit unless there's a specific reason they need to use 32-bit (embedded systems, portability, etc.)

Then the library had a bug. Hopefully she reported it so it could be fixed.

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