On Tue, 27 Sep 2011, Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> wrote:
Yes, but do you care? The day to day performance difference approximates zero, and it has done for several years, for most practical purposes. You can tell the difference when it comes to compiling software in languages with highly efficient compilers (eg: not, generally, C or C++), and when doing extremely CPU intensive operations (3D rendering, encoding), but desktop stuff?
The main performance issue I have on DESKTOP tasks (as opposed to compiling, video processing, etc) is web browsing. For that the difference between a Pentium-M 1.7GHz (like a P3) and a dual-core 64bit CPU wasn't that obvious - Mozilla is slow everywhere. Supporting more than 4G of RAM is a real performance benefit for modern desktop software, something that is a problem with my latest desktop system that is limited to 3300M of RAM (nasty Intel). For my desktop stuff moving from Mozilla to Chrome was a much better performance boost than moving from 32bit to dual-core 64bit. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/