64 bit benefits?

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songshop
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64 bit benefits?

Post by songshop » Thu Feb 07, 2008 9:59 pm

is there any ? any known benchmarks for it ?

g

sbenno
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Re: 64 bit benefit

Post by sbenno » Fri Feb 08, 2008 6:58 pm

I only quickly tried LinuxSampler's synthetic voice benchmark, gigsynth (to get an estimate of polyphony)
I tested on windows with gcc3 and on Linux with gcc4 in 64bit mode.
In 64bit mode I got an improvement in polyphony of 30-50%
But OTOH I don't know if it's in part to gcc4 generating better code and Linux being a bit faster than windows.
Anyway apart that in 64bit mode you don't have the 4GB RAM limit anymore (currently the limit
is that most mainboards cannot hold more than 16GB RAM but this will change fast)
64bit definitively leads to higher performance, probably because the x64 model has twice the number
of registers so DSP algorithms can be executed faster without resorting so frequently to memory accesses
due to CPU register shortage.

songshop
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Re: 64 bit benefit

Post by songshop » Fri Feb 08, 2008 11:15 pm

wow ! that's well worthwhile then :)
thanks for the info... guess who's building a 64bit gentoo then ....

best,

g.

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cuse
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Re: 64 bit benefit

Post by cuse » Sat Feb 09, 2008 9:31 am

You can easily find out the benefits of a 64 bit version, by using (as Benno did) our light-weight benchmark:

http://linuxsampler.org/debian.html#benchmark

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