Advantage of 64bit over 32bit

[Deepak J]

Actually there's a lot of discussion lately about support for x32 (or running 32 bit apps on 64-bit systems). There are definitely advantages both ways, but it mostly depends on your CPU (and the amount of caching it can do).

my specs are as follows
Intel Core2 Duo E7400 - 2.8 GHz, 3 MB cache
2 GB - DDR 2
On board 128 MB graphics(planning to upgrade to a 1GB GPU)

I basically do music creation,mixing and editing. Programming - mainly C 'n C++, casual gaming and surfing the net

[Paqman]

The other day I read somewhere that though the modern machines are shipped with 64 bit compatible processors, most of the popular softwares are still supported by 32 bit systems.

That's probably written from a Windows perspective. With open source software supplying a 64-bit version is as simple as compiling it against that system. So everything that's available in the repos as 32-bit is also available as 64-bit.

Also is there something like 'downward compatibility' for this 64 bit systems. I mean can we still run 32 bit programs on the 64 bit sys..?

Yes, although you'll probably find you don't need to. It used to be necessary for stuff like Flash, but I haven't had to run any 32-bit software for years now.

[mips]

If you have a 64-bit CPU there is no reason why you should not run 64-bit linux.

Things like audio & video encoding are faster, compressing & uncompressing files are faster, encryption based apps are faster, compiling source code is faster, memory reads & writes are faster and a few other things I have forgotten about.

Software availability on Linux has not been a issue for several years now, everything in the 32-bit repos is available in the 64-bit repos. Do not confuse generalised statements which refer more to windows with linux, currently windows lags linux in 64-bit support (apps & drivers hence running 32-bit apps on windows 64-bit).

I've been running 64-bit linux since 2006, back then there were a few issues you had to work around but these days there is absolutely no reason not to go 64-bit if you have the hardware.

[Deepak J]

Thanx guys for the advices. I'm gonna straight away switch to 64 bit version.

[rai4shu2]

Yeah. You don't get x32 without a solid 64-bit system to begin with, and they haven't even implemented it, yet. So, there's really no point in avoiding 64-bit. In particular, once gcc stable has x32 support. Then the benchmarks can start guiding us down that path (what apps work better that way and which don't).