32 or 64??

Amedee Van Gasse amedee-ubuntu at amedee.be
Sun Jan 31 19:46:04 UTC 2010


On 31-01-10 10:44, Robert Spanjaard wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:25:30 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
>
>>> Depends what you consider faster.  Most people won't notice any
>>> difference on the desktop, since your bottleneck is almost entirely
>>> going to be hard drive (in particular, head seek time).
>>
>>       Generally speaking the bottleneck is between they keyboard and
>>       chair.  ;)
>
> Depends on the task. On my desktop, I regularly use 100% of the CPU's
> power for image and video editing. But on my notebook, it usually stays
> below 2%.
> In any case, I didn't notice any difference when switching from 32 to 64
> bit, but I haven't measured it with a stopwatch.
>
He's right you know.
Applications with a user interface are usually I/O bound, and a lot of 
the times it isn't hard disk or network I/O, but waiting for input from 
a mouse or keyboard. The best example is a word processing application.
Server applications on the other hand, don't have to wait for user 
input. Only for hard disk and/or network. And number crunching apps like 
SETI at home (almost) don't even have to wait at all for input/output 
(relative to the time they spend on number crunching).
Your image/video editing apps behave a bit like both. When you have 
selected an action that will take a long time to process, then a 
well-written video processing app will spawn a process or thread that 
will do your actions in the background, very similar to a server 
process, without any further input from you, the user.




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