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Well theoretically you should gain some with the full 64 bit memory paths in the processor ... But it looks like whatever gain there might be is lost with poor software design. Multithreading also needs some real attention before multiple processor chips is going to mean much to average users. Now they just seem to idle along.

I have been using UNIX since well since, OK, I forgot ... I did meet with Dennis Ritchie back in the old days at AT&T trying to convince him and others to let UNIX go, but AT&T was determined to try and make money off it. Bad move ...

Tagline works ... LOL.

Well theoretically you should gain some with the full 64 bit memory paths in the processor ... But it looks like whatever gain there might be is lost with poor software design.

Well, with 64-bit the pointers are twice as large so there is a decrease in performance right there.

64-bit means that you can move twice as much data across the core in the same amount of time but unless your applications are IO or memory bound you won't see a significant increase above a 32-bit system.

Once you move above 4GB of RAM 64-bit really takes off, mainly because using BigMem or HugeMem pages on a 32-bit system induces a significant performance hit due to the way that a 32-bit system has to page RAM (much like the old EMS memory management under DOS.)

If you have a 32-bit system with 32GB of memory, like many of the databases I deal with at work, moving to 64-bit will show a marked performance increase, but if your system has 4GB or less and is idling along with less than 5% IO you're not going to see much improvement.

It's also true that a lot of application software really isn't taking advantage of the larger memory space or extra registers available on a 64-bit platform. A lot of application people have just recompiled their apps to run on 64-bit systems. That will get better with time and more exposure to 64-bit programming.

Multithreading also needs some real attention before multiple processor chips is going to mean much to average users. Now they just seem to idle along.

Windows could help with this. I'm running XP Pro on a Phenom Quad, and while you can associate a given app to prefer a given core, by default XP seems to throw everything on Core 1. Manually associating every app with a given core is a stupid idea, first because it takes my man hours instead of Microsoft's, and second, because even if I did go and associate 25% of the things I run with each core, the mix of what I'm running at any given time is always different so from time to time I'd probably end up running all the Core 2 stuff at the same time. Why doesn't XP default to using an unused core if one is available??