AMD64 Surpasses i386 As Debian's Most Popular Architecture

An anonymous reader writes with a quick note about the changing tides of computer architecture. From the article: "Bill Allombert announced [yesterday] via the Debian-devel mailing list that the X86_64 version of Debian has now surpassed all of the other supported architectures by a narrow margin. The most surprising part of this announcement however, and accompanying info-graphics provided on the Debian Popularity Contest page, is that this was not already true."

Comments

The actual advantage is dubious, though!

[aglider]

While a lot of people thinks that a 64bit CPU deserves a 64bit OS for the sake of speed, it seems it's not so clear that it'd be a good move.
First, you need to have at least a single thread that requires more than 4GB RAM at once.
Say after me: "a single thread that requires more than 4GB RAM at once".
Probably an heavy loaded DB (to load a lot of indices in RAM) or a computer graphics imagery application or some other application with very very large data set to be worked on at once. Not impossible, but not so widespread. Maybe very large Java application can swallow all that RAM.
For a general understanding of CPU horsepower, give a look to a very simple observation (I wouldn't call it a real TEST) you can find in Linux from Scratch documentation

a 64-bit build is only 4% faster and is 9% larger than the 32-bit build

This also means that you have (more or less) 9% more chances that your code won't fit into the CPU cache, making that 4% extra speed less effective. And that you'll need (more or less) 9% more RAM to execute 64bit programs.
So, in my extremely humble opinion, unless you are running an heavy duty, heavy loaded server, you won't benefit that much from a 64bit OS on a 64bit6 CPU.