It’s been a very long time coming, but it looks like 64-bit computing is finally hitting the mainstream.
According to this article over at Daily Tech, “Majority of Windows 7 Installations Will Be 64-bit“, with 25% of Windows Vista machines in the US running the 64-bit version, we will see a much higher uptake of 64-bit versions of the upcoming Windows 7.
In addition it is looking likely that Windows 7 will be the last Windows operating system that will offer a native 32-bit version.
AMD first launched desktop computer chips with 64-bit capabilities over 5 years ago in 2003. At the time you couldn’t take advantage of this using Windows, although Linux already had 64-bit operating systems available at that time.
Considering 64-bit chips have been available for mass usage for over 5 years, it seems remarkable that it is only now that the Windows operating system is beginning to take advantage of it. In addition it puts things in even more perspective when you realise that the first 64-bit computer originated in 1961!
The Advantage of 64-Bit
The biggest advantage that the normal computer user will see is the potential to increase the amount of RAM that can be installed on their computer.
With 32-bit computing, the maximum amount of RAM you can have in a Windows system is between 3 and 3.5Gb. After that it doesn’t matter how much RAM you have installed, the 32-bit operating system won’t recognise it.
With 64-bit computing you open this amount up to a theoretical 16.8 million terabytes of RAM1. Plenty to tide us over for the time being.
The reason that the RAM limitation of 32-bit computing wasn’t considered a major issue until now is that for all barring power users, up to 3Gb of RAM was more than adequate for most computing tasks. However, with the increasing speed of memory manufacturing price drops you can now pick up 4Gb of RAM for €382. Couple this fact with the ever increasing RAM requirements of applications and things like Windows Vista, the move to 64-bit couldn’t happen sooner.
Steering Clear of Vista – 64 bit or otherwise
As has been mentioned in the past on this blog, our experiences with Vista have been less than rewarding. Knowing from experience that Windows XP64 is a bit of a disaster zone, I have begun to investigate the world of Linux for my web design and development purposes.
I have happily installed Xubuntu 64-bit on my laptop and whilst a few things took a little bit of adjustment, everything seems to be running well, and coding websites has been fairly straightforward. Whilst there are a couple of tools I miss3, the experience has been quite rewarding and customising the laptop to my needs did not take long.
Unfortunately It has been necessary for me to maintain not just a dual-boot system with Windows XP, which allows me to boot into Windows in order to run music production applications I own, but it’s also necessary for me to have Windows available to me in a virtual machine on the laptop in order to ensure complete testing of websites in various browsers including Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.
As far as I can see I won’t be able to abandon Windows for some time, for both the purposes of music production and website testing, although it is definitely my intention to completely avoid Windows Vista and perhaps when Windows 7 comes along it will be impossible for me to justify not utilising it and taking advantage of the increased RAM availability for memory intensive music applications.
- Reference taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit
- This sample price has been picked up from Komplett: http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=344701
- such as WesternCiv’s StyleMaster for CSS coding
3:04 pm
January 23rd, 2009
Fond memories:
1995: Sun launched it’s 64-bit SPARC processor, the UltraSPARC. IBM & DEC also released 64bit processors and Operating Systems.
I remember working on a 64bit DEC ALPHASTATION in 1999. I replaced Windows NT3.51(32bit) for BSD(64bit).
Through the late 90′s I operated on OpenVMS (64bit) and many
SysOps had the joy or horror of using a SPARC 64bit workstation. Sometimes we would use the CDE (Common Desktop Enviroment)
2001: Intel Launched the Itanium
2003: AMD introduces its Opteron and Athlon 64 processor.
6 year on and we’re still using 32bit software!
Who is at fault, MS, the major software vendors?
Now that everyone is moving to 64bit, it would be nice to see plans for 128bit CPUs for Servers & Desktops:-)
Here is a short and sweet article regarding 64bit Gnu/Linux:
http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?threadid=93648&catid=317
3:15 pm
January 28th, 2009
Wow, thanks for the background!
It certainly does seem amazing that things have taken so long to switch over to 64bit. I imagine manufacturers would be quite happy to see people being forced to upgrade their systems as a result of software requirements though. That’s a nice little article on the AMD forum as well. I’ve read quite a few benchmarking articles about the performance differences between 64 and 32 bit systems and 64-bit shows clear performance advantages.
6:22 pm
January 28th, 2009
On Linux bigsmp has been enabling us to break out of 32bit RAM ceiling for a while now.
In response to Alex: as with most things performance wise — it depends on the benchmark. You just need to test things out and see, and in a server environment you really need to stress test things before you can come to a decision and you may be amazed by the benchmarks; in certain server scenarios I have opted for 32bit which out performed 64 bit machines “in the real world” by 30%.