Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 21st Jan 2009 11:30 UTC
We've been able to drop the world of 32bit for a while now, with 64bit processors and support for them being prevalent in all popular, modern operating systems. However, where Mac OS X and Linux seem to make the move to 64bit rather effortlessly, Windows has more problems. Even though 32bit applications should run fine on 64bit Windows, some don't; and to make matters worse, drivers need to be 64bit, as there's no support for 32bit drivers in 64bit versions of Windows. Still, Gizmodo claims that with Windows 7, the time is right to take the plunge. But really, is it so? And why do Linux and Mac OS X seem to handle the transition so much easier?
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Member since:
2009-01-21
Actually, in long mode (IA-32e mode in Intel jargon) paging scheme is further expanded upon PAE, consisting of up to 4 levels of paging data structure (PAE under 32-bit mode has 3 levels). PAE has to be enabled prior to entering long mode. So it's a moot point. Extra registers certainly help, and Win32 API call conventions for 64-bit system are changed to utilize more registers accordingly. The main advantage is still the ability to address more physical memory and also allowing programs to use a larger virtual memory space.