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It is rumoured that video processing is somewhat faster in 64-bit but the one application I have for video encoding (avidemux) is not. Tested against a stopwatch the 64-bit version is just as fast as the 32-bit one.
What applications take advantage of 64-bit cpu instructions so the 64-bit version runs faster?
Why would it? For a given cache size you get fewer 64-bit words than 32-bit words in it, so 32-bit code ought to run faster in general. The cases where data is inherently 64-bit are rare.
Any processor-intensive video work is done on the GPU, not the CPU, and code running on the CPU is handling pixel-by-pixel so not likely to make use of 64-bit.
The main savings with 64-bit is not having to do two cycles for address calculations. I can't see that making a big difference in performance.
What applications take advantage of 64-bit cpu instructions so the 64-bit version runs faster?
It's not so much the app as the build. Distros offer conservative builds that run at least ok even on very old 64bit chips without the new stuff, and finding 64bit's sweet spot on 32bit-sized workloads is a tuning thing anyway. So tune it: build from source with -march=native and -O3 for starters and you'll have an app that uses what your particular hardware offers.
It depends a lot on what programs and codecs you are using. Make sure to compile with the '-march=native' option. Also make sure to install yasm. I use ffmpeg, and it is faster on 64-bit. Other things are faster too like making and extracting archives, and other things. The only program I've found to be slower is imagemagick, for strange reasons. I don't use it, so it doesn't matter. EDIT: Always use -O2 and never -O3, because -O3 can cause instability in programs, I've seen it first hand.
Last edited by H_TeXMeX_H; 04-18-2011 at 12:15 PM.
You may want to have a look at this article from Phoronix, it compares a 32 bit, a 32 bit PAE and a 64 bit system. There are applications where you will see a significant difference in performance.
You may want to have a look at this article from Phoronix, it compares a 32 bit, a 32 bit PAE and a 64 bit system. There are applications where you will see a significant difference in performance.
Thanks, that's useful, and sums it up. Everything is faster on 64-bit (I guess I should use graphicsmagick). And take a look at Apache and Postmark ... now that's a difference. Also notice the overhead caused by PAE.
Great benchmark, will bookmark it and cite it when someone decides to argue against 64-bit.
Last edited by H_TeXMeX_H; 04-19-2011 at 10:31 AM.
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