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Windows XP 64-Bit Customer Preview Program
MBCook writes "I just notice that Microsoft has a new Windows XP 64-Bit Customer Preview Program starting today (February 3rd). If you have a AMD Opteron or Athlon64, you can go to the download page to get your copy. It's a pre-release copy that will expire in 360 days (which probably means the final will be out by then). Now Intel just changed their 64-bit plans, and all of a sudden this appears. Speculate away!"
There were linux benchmarks which made /. recently, comparing the speed of 32-bit code and 64-bit code on the Opteron. 32-bit code ran measurably faster.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
char is 8-bit, nearly by definition
short is 16-bit
int is 32-bit (DOS and Xenix are not modern)
long is 32-bit on all Windows OSes
long is the same size as a pointer Linux, BSD, Mac
void* is the natural size for the machine
long long is 64-bit
So 32-bit Windows and 32-bit UNIX have the
same sizes a each other. 64-bit systems differ,
because Windows sets sizeof(long)==4 and a
UNIX system sets sizeof(long)==sizeof(void*).
Go their benchmarks aslo show a marked improvement for Linux on 64bit.
Some tests scored about as much as a 20% improvement in performance, athough it's more realistic to expect a 8-10% average improvement across the board.
Of course windows likely will run slower since it's so optimized for the older 32bit platform.
Linux is just a much more mature platform for 64bit computers. I mean we've had Suse 64bit (aviable for free from Suse's ftp install stuff) for almost a year now.
Here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/64bit/e xtended/trial/default.mspx
Beta of course.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
On Win2K and higher, you can split out the file system browsing from the desktop instance of Explorer.exe. Run Explorer and select Tools->Folder Options->View->"Launch folder windows in a separate process". It uses a little more memory but prevents a slow device from slowing down the rest of the GUI.
You're right, though; Explorer blocks waiting for I/O way more often than it ought to. Most of the multithreading in GUIs is pretty good on Windows, so I'm not sure why Explorer tends to block on floppy I/O, network I/O, etc. Fortunately, it usually doesn't affect other running apps.