Your thoughts on 64Bit

[megahertza]

I like the old days when it used to be Intel or AMD. But now theres dual core and 64bit and I'm getting abit confused about it all.

My understandings are that 64bit processors are primarly for servers and so and the Dual cores are much better for performance pc with gaming in mind.

[ubuntu_demon]

I like the old days when it used to be Intel or AMD. But now theres dual core and 64bit and I'm getting abit confused about it all.

My understandings are that 64bit processors are primarly for servers and so and the Dual cores are much better for performance pc with gaming in mind.
At this point in time IMHO 64 bit is only interesting for (some) servers and for scientific computing.

[Ubuntuud]

64bit processors can take much more memory, it probably is the future, but I don't think you are planning on buying more than 4 Gig RAM. If you do 2 to the power of 32 (number of bits) you get "4294967296" (bytes). So that's amount of RAM.
Do 2 to the power of 64 and you'll get "18446744073709551616". And that's quite a lot of RAM... (Used for serious calculations like the weather)

This also happens when you buy a harddisk. They say you get 60 GB (60.000.000.000 bytes) but windows calculates it with the official way and says you have got somewhere between 50-60.

That's the difference between 64bit and ordinary, 32bit.
And that's also the reason why it is stupid to put such a processor in a laptop. Only consumes power.

I don't really know what the benefit of the dualcore is though.

[prizrak]

It's fairly simple - more speed. 64 bit CPU's have twice as much address space as 32bit, which of course lets them hold twice as much info on the CPU itself (not in RAM or HDD) so it can crunch numbers faster. Dual core makes multithreaded programs run better as each core can be used to execute different threads of the same program simultaneously as opposed to consequtively. Basically it's all about the speed 64bit is faster than 32 and dual core is faster than single.
In terms of practical applications I use single core 32bit CPU's (in the 2Ghz range) in both my machines and they work fine for my needs, of course I don't game or compile huge programs so I don't need much speed.

[megahertza]

I've seen alot of talk about 64Bit and some of it from friends which are not techs or anywhere close. To my understandings to get the most functionality out of 64bit you require programs and Os designed for 64bit. Since I don't have any need for huge Database programs or server needs i think i'll be going for dual core. Thanks for the info guys, now I can advise my friends a bit more.

[mips]

64bit would be great if all software supported it, unfortunately this is not the case but it will eventually get there. Benefit is that you can move twice as much data around in 64bits as in 32bits during the same time so it increases performance.

Core Due or Dual Core basically means you have 2 CPU cores on one chip. This effectively is the same as having 2 CPUs in your pc. Benefit is that applications/processes get 'split' between the 2 core which give you better performance.

Eventually all cpus will be 64bit with multiple cores. The AMD 64bit Turion X2 (dual core) for laptops will be coming out soon.

[megahertza]

I'm assuming that CPU won't be graded by Clock speeds soon, that they will be eventually craded by number of cores and how much data they can move.