XP 64? use or not

Building some computers for my friend and it just hit us we might need 64.

specs are intel core2 quad, p5e asus, 8600gt, with 4(1x4) gigs of ram.

these are for rendering with maya mainly and ive never had a need for 64 with my own computers. should i download, i mean buy, 64 or stick with oldschool xp

If you want better proformance, then 64. Just whatever you do,
DO NOT USE VISTA.

>>2
SECONDED

>>2
Why does 64bit offer better performance?

>>4

64>32

the operating system can assign more then 4gig virtual address space  so lots of calculation can be done. However it does have potential of getting your box slowing down

Also, AMD cleaned up the instruction set a bit for 64-bit mode. There are twice as many integer and FP registers (x86 is register starved for lots of applications). And the addressing modes were rationalised, either some were added or some that were never used were removed, I can't remember.

The end effect of this is that amd64 is faster than x86. This is different to most CPUs that were designed properly from the start (e.g. PowerPC) where more memory fetches associated with addresses twice as long actually slow things down unless you need >4Gb of memory.

>>5
I don't get it.

>>6
So how does this offer better performance than 32bit architecture?

>>7
Ah, that's finally something. Well, sounds as if we won't really benefit from x64 until applications have been revamped to take advantage of these architecture cleanups. And I'm not talking about a quick recompile like they seem to have done with XP 64.

>>8
I don't get it.
The processor is twice as large, twice as complicated, four times as hot, eight times more power-hungry, and computes slightly faster because it can add two numbers at the same time (disregarding that you'll have to do some hundred instructions more compared to IA-32 to get the two numbers into a 64-bit register).

Oh, and it includes a 32-bit compatibility layer which complicates the processor to the level where it is completely useless.

Get an Alpha.

>>8
The only revamping required _is_ a quick recompile. If an OS is written correctly, the compiler (and a few hundred lines of assembler for booting and stuff that's impossible in C) is the only thing that needs to change for different instruction sets.

Ignore that, this is Microsoft we're talking about. I'm sure you'll have to pay through the nose for an upgrade.

>>9
Those were my thoughts as well, when I first asked. Still seems to me that 64 bit doesn't offer much of a performance improvement. Another thing is that storage is probably the largest bottleneck these days. There's a reason why Microsoft recommends RAID0 for Vista.

>>10
>The only revamping required _is_ a quick recompile.

Well ok, provided the compiler does its job well. Still, all those enhanced instruction sets of the past, like MMX, SSE etc do require lots of hand optimizations in the code and there are still not many applications that make heavy use of those. And >>7 seemed to suggest that such optimizations would also be needed in the case of 64 bit architecture to make optimal use of the advantages of the architecture.

I GOT YOUR HAND OPTIMIZATION RIGHT HERE BITCH

>>11
In practice, you aren't going to be reading from disk continually when you're doing shit, but from RAM and cache memory. Vista is an exception because it expands to occupy all available RAM, so it *will* be swapping to disk all the time, but you aren't running Vista.

And this isn't the 1960s anymore. Compiler theory has come a long way, and there are very good optimising compilers out there. If anything, hand optimisations are to be avoided because compilers don't generally touch assembly code itself.
Generally speaking, if your code is compiled for a 64-bit system, it will take advantages of the architecture more than adequately, and almost always far better than a human programmer could hand-optimise it, especially for really large projects like OSes.

MY OS IS SMALL

IT HAS ONE FUNCTION CALL CALLED VOID DOITYOURDAMNSELF(VOID)

>>13
Enlightening, thanks.