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First Intel Yonah Laptop Announced
Lam1969 writes "IDG News Service reports NEC will release its first laptop based on Intel's Yonah dual-core processor in the first quarter of 2006, for just under $2,000. According to AnandTech, Yonah performance is comparable to AMD Athlon 64 X2, and is more efficient than the AMD chip in terms of power consumption."
No, not at all. That made no sense. I wouldn't be too surprised if you bought a Nintendo 64 just for the publicity.
When we talk about the difference between 32 and 64 bits, we are generally referring to the size of the largest unit of data the processor treats at each moment (ie. the word size). 64 bit processors, IMHO, currently have only one real advantage over 32 bit ones, which is the exponentially larger addressing space, but this isn't really urgent seeing as the RAM limit for 32 bit architectures is 8 GB and we still have a couple of years ahead before desktops starting having this much memory.
Manufacturers try to make customers overlook the fallacy that just because you have a bigger number, the performance will rise accordingly. It's the same with clock frequency. Many other factors are on trial, such as the strategies employed for pipelining or branch prediction and if these aren't engineered properly, there's no real benefit in being able to process more data. Furthermore, as the grandparent said, 64 bit datapaths basically imply more electronics, and longer paths take longer to cross; thus, a compromise must be taken between all those factors.