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AMD64 Windows vs. Fedora vs. SuSE benchmarks

Posted by Hemos on from the testing-them-all-out dept.

Illissius writes "AnandTech just posted a review comparing 32- and 64-bit performance on both Linux and Windows. They focused on what is available out of the box without having to compile anything seperately - unfortunately, 64-bit binaries weren't available for most of the Windows benchmarks. To save people the pain of RTFA, there's a very tangible gain moving to 64-bitness, Linux wins some (MySQL, UT2004), and Windows wins some (rendering, RtCW)."

4 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. How can you compare if binaries not avail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What is the point if the same tasks cant be carried out?

    1. Re:How can you compare if binaries not avail by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful
      A 64-bit processor's dynamic range is approximately 4.3 billion times greater than a 32-bit processor, which simply means, it can work with much larger numbers. Thats Important in applications like rendering, mathmatical calculations, and even database servers .

      PCs have supported 64-bit and 80-bit floating point numbers since the early 1980s. You're talking about 64-bit integers, which are extremely rarely used in mainstream apps; I've probably used them less than a dozen times in 20 years of programming. Rendering and mathematical apps usually use floating point for any number where dynamic range would be an issue. Databases may use long integers, but I/O is probably a far greater bottleneck for a database server than long integer math. It takes orders of magnitude longer to read a long integer field out of the table than it does to add it, even if you split the addition into two 32-bit steps.

      You also didn't mention that all of the larger 64-bit pointers come at a cost: increased pressure on your cache resources. This would tend to decrease performance unless you really need 64-bit addressing.

      The main reason that AMDs chips are faster on desktop apps are more registers, faster memory controller, and cache architecture. None of those features has anything to do with 64-bitness.

  2. uhm, what's the point by Vacuous · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They are using a 64-bit processor, on 64-bit enabled Operating systems, and benchmarking using 32-bit code, which in most cases is going to be slower on the 64-bit platform. On top of that, they aren't even using any of the 64-bit memory addressing so what is the freaking point of any of it. On top of that they are benchmarking in incomplete version of Windows, which a previous poster pointed out probably still has a bunch of debuig code/optimizing to be done.

  3. Biased, as usual by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "SuSE comes out ahead of Fedora consistently - but more importantly, both Linux distributions also lay waste to the 64-bit and 32-bit editions of Windows XP"

    Huh? This was in the conclusion of the article. Close results, but I wouldn't call it "laying waste" to anything.

    And maybe I'm dumb or just a fanboy, but weren't they using 32 bit binaries on alot of the Windows tests? With Linux programs that had been ported to Windows, not vice-versa? I don't know much, but I know that most ports are certainly not uniformly well writen accross platforms, especially when done by other developers or as an afterthought. Not to mention this was all on a beta version of Windows?

    Just some things to think about. Not that many think on their own here.