Re: ADT Pro With Windows 7 (64-Bit)

[Alex Freed <alex_news@mirrow.com>]

> to play and my PCs to "get from point A to point B".  To stretch
> that metaphor, having a 16-cylinder engine wouldn't get me to the
> store any faster or more economically.

That's a great comparison!

Migration from 16 to 32 bits was unavoidable just because so many
application require operations on numbers bigger than 16 bits. If
you need to add 2 32 bit numbers you'll spend a lot more cycles on
a 16 bit CPU to do it. By contrast very few common tasks need numbers
bigger than 32 bits. And for video/audio processing the modern CPUs
have vector operations and rather long registers. For this reason
there doesn't seem to be a clear benefit of using 64 bit architecture
apart from a huge address space that, as was pointed out, is not needed
for a vast majority of desktop applications.

I didn't look close at the 64 bit AMD/Intel architecture but I wonder
if it is possible to have an "extender" allowing a particular 
application to use 64 bit registers while running under a 32 bit OS.
Just like the DOS 32 bit extenders in late 80s.

-Alex.