Why move to WinXP 64bit with less than 4gb?

LordBritish

LordBritish

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Is there any compelling reason to move from WinXP 32bit to 64bit if you have less than 4gb of memory?

I currently am running WinXP Pro 32bit on a A64 3400+ Clawhammer with 2gb memory.
 
Unless you're a developer who needs that much memory, or an audio engineer who'd like to take advantage of Sonar 5, I don't think there's any compelling reason...

However, I've been running 64bit for the past month. It's solid, and I prefer it over XP Pro for the work I do (mostly graphics), but you really need to do your homework on drivers before you make the jump. That's why going dual boot seems to be the preferred way of transitioning, if you need to be productive on your machine while testing the 64 bit waters. In a year, when Vista arrives, and XP 64bit starts to fade, it'll be much easier, Right now, XP 64 bit is a great OS that has not quite been embraced by enough manufacturers.

...aww go for it...;-)
 
Dennis Gordon said:
Unless you're a developer who needs that much memory, or an audio engineer who'd like to take advantage of Sonar 5, I don't think there's any compelling reason...

However, I've been running 64bit for the past month. It's solid, and I prefer it over XP Pro for the work I do (mostly graphics), but you really need to do your homework on drivers before you make the jump. That's why going dual boot seems to be the preferred way of transitioning, if you need to be productive on your machine while testing the 64 bit waters. In a year, when Vista arrives, and XP 64bit starts to fade, it'll be much easier, Right now, XP 64 bit is a great OS that has not quite been embraced by enough manufacturers.

...aww go for it...;-)
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Why will XP x64 fade when Vista arrives so fast? XP x64 just was released. I would think XP x64 will also stay around a while when 64-bit programs start going mainstream. I at leats would surte hope so. Honestly, what is going to be so great about Vista when Windows XP and Server 2003 are already good operating systems.
 
Super Mario said:
Why will XP x64 fade when Vista arrives so fast? XP x64 just was released. I would think XP x64 will also stay around a while when 64-bit programs start going mainstream. I at leats would surte hope so. Honestly, what is going to be so great about Vista when Windows XP and Server 2003 are already good operating systems.
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Well I for one hope that XP 64 bit sticks around and is further developed, but I sometimes feel that its sort of the Window ME of 2005... just put out there to give 64 bit enthusuasts something to nibble on (and pay for) until the big Vista rollout. Vista, which will be available in both 32 and 64 bit versions, will probably get 10X the hype that XP 64bit gets, and by that time the search for drivers won't be such an issue.

Hey, I like XP 64 bit enough that I bought it, and use it every day. But for the average user, it's not exactly the next big thing. I hope it's not forgotten when that big thing does come along..
 
Honestly, who is going to need Vista 32-bit? XP already does more than enough in the 32-bit computing Windows world. Wouldn't it be pointless to upgrade to Vista 32-bit from Windows XP 32-bit?
 
Super Mario said:
Why will XP x64 fade when Vista arrives so fast? XP x64 just was released. I would think XP x64 will also stay around a while when 64-bit programs start going mainstream. I at leats would surte hope so. Honestly, what is going to be so great about Vista when Windows XP and Server 2003 are already good operating systems.
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To tell you the truth, I think most people are just going to stick with XP.
 
while im not a developer at ms , so i just go on imperical evidence.

ive seen interviews with many MS devs mentioning really good things about stuff with x64, internal stuff how its very easy to do things that ore often complex in a 32bit os...

and ask around, many people including myself find the 64bit os to be signficantly faster/more reliable than its 32bit counterpart. although since the differences are in teh core, it will not show up on a 32bit benchark, especially one that reliese heavily on the display driver, which is much less mature than its 32bit counterpart. i do lots of heavy multitasking, and i just find it better... but this type of use is very hard to benchark and yeild a significant result.
 
snoopy said:
To tell you the truth, I think most people are just going to stick with XP.
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Probably at first. There will always be those who line up at Frys at 12:01AM to get their hands on the latest, but most of the world isn't in that much of a hurry. As the hardware turns over and the new OS matures, XP will show attrition. It wasn't until the past year really that many Windows 98 machines were replaced with XP boxes, so I imagine that XP still has 4-5 years of life...
 
Dennis Gordon said:
Probably at first. There will always be those who line up at Frys at 12:01AM to get their hands on the latest, but most of the world isn't in that much of a hurry. As the hardware turns over and the new OS matures, XP will show attrition. It wasn't until the past year really that many Windows 98 machines were replaced with XP boxes, so I imagine that XP still has 4-5 years of life...
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Exactly. Vista just seems like a "prettier" XP to me. XP is perfectly fine besides a few bugs that can be fixed with simple updates, not a whole new OS.
 
XP x64 is more stable/faster than the x32 because it's built from Server 2003 SP1 code base. I've been told by M$ developers that it really easy for them to just port the code base to XP and remove the server parts and offer the x64 client. Why offer just the x64 server when you already have the code base that will take almost no tweaking to make it work?
 
I simply upgraded to X64 because I got a full copy free from my college through their partnership with MS.

I will say this, it's much quicker and more reliable than it's 32-bit brother. Now, the trade offs like driver and device support is kind of eh, but it's liveable.
 
LordBritish said:
Is there any compelling reason to move from WinXP 32bit to 64bit if you have less than 4gb of memory?
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I can think of one reason.
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LordBritish said:
Is there any compelling reason to move from WinXP 32bit to 64bit if you have less than 4gb of memory?
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For the same reasons people transitioned to 32-bit without everyone going balls-out with 2Gb of memory.

This isn't just about scientific computing, since they've already moved forward with 64-bit use before a consumer chip was released. This just makes it easier for them to develop and refine their apps. However, for those of you who play games or do any kind of content creation (video, audio, or images), 64-bits is going to make a huge deal. In this article from Ars, Jon Stokes explains the technical side of 64-bit computing rather well (though a bit of math comprehension is necessary). He quotes a statement by Tim Sweeney from Epic Games (UT2003) in the article:
Tim Sweeney said:
On a daily basis we're running into the Windows 2GB barrier with our next-generation content development and preprocessing tools.

If cost-effective, backwards-compatible 64-bit CPU's were available today, we'd buy them today. We need them today. It looks like we'll get them in April.

Any claim that "4GB is enough" or that address windowing extensions are a viable solution are just plain nuts. Do people really think programmers will re-adopt early 1990's bank-swapping technology?

Many of these upcoming Opteron motherboards have 16 DIMM slots; you can fill them with 8GB of RAM for $800 at today's pricewatch.com prices. This platform is going to be a godsend for anybody running serious workstation apps. It will beat other 64-bit workstation platforms (SPARC/PA-RISC/Itanium) in price/performance by a factor of 4X or more. The days of $4000 workstation and server CPU's are over, and those of $1000 CPU's are numbered.

Regarding this "far off" application compatibility, we've been running the 64-bit SuSE Linux distribution on Hammer for over 3 months. We're going to ship the 64-bit version of UT2003 at or before the consumer Athlon64 launch. And our next-generation engine won't just support 64-bit, but will basically REQUIRE it on the content-authoring side.

We tell Intel this all the time, begging and pleading for a cost-effective 64-bit desktop solution. Intel should be listening to customers and taking the leadership role on the 64-bit desktop transition, not making these ridiculous "end of the decade" statements to the press.

If the aim of this PR strategy is to protect the non-existant [sic] market for $4000 Itaniums from the soon-to-be massive market for cost-effective desktop 64-bit, it will fail very quickly.

-Tim Sweeney, Epic Games
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And while this may lead people to assume that, as far as games and content-creation apps are concerned, the only difference will be more RAM—and, indeed, lots of the typical 'post-screenshots-of-benchmarks with cut-n-pasted pseudo-explanations of what they're supposed to mean' websites out there seem to predictably fall right into—such assumptions are assuming RAM and the GPU are the biggest factors with game development. These things are two of the largest factors with game play, but on the development side of things the ability of the CPU to handle environments, objects within the environments, and computing the behavior of both on-the-fly are the major focus. These guys want more bandwidth along with the capacity, and just adding memory or ramping up the clock speeds only diverts the need for more bandwidth in most cases. Moving to 64-bit architecture gives them the increased bandwidth, more efficient instruction sets (getting rid of old, mostly obsolete sets), and also quadruples the effective memory address space.

This doesn't mean double the performance or some kind of breakthrough in AI for games, because a lot of that is still going to have to do with the software side of things. However, imagine games where switching between two or more levels gets cut down to being one level environment. Imagine a strategy game where the effective numbers and capabilities of combatants becomes more equal to those you see in computer-generated battles in movies. For content creation, imagine having to wait considerably less time for those movie files or images to render. Sure, the possibilities aren't the pie-in-the-sky images of computers effectively cutting processing time in half, but it's the next step toward getting to that point (we've already surpassed the processing time from just five and ten years ago).

Moreover, consider the time when games really began entering the realm of multimedia experience we enjoy today: back when the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit began taking hold.

Chances are, we're only going to see initial gains of 15-25% in performance with these first couple generations of 64-bit CPU/OS combinations. Maybe, as more applications are compiled for the environment, those increases will get more noticable. Maybe not. Regardless, we're already finding that ramping clock speeds up is not going to answer our growing desire for computing power, so alternatives are necessary. The Mobile Pentium (Centrino) and the latest iterations of the AMD chips have shown us that performance equalling those of chips with much higher clocks speeds is possible with better, more efficient instructions and architectures. The 64-bit architecture is further expanding those alternatives and possibilities.
 
Folks, if you don't remember transitioning from 16-bit to 32-bit drivers, well you just aren't old enough. :p

You could measure the difference in boot times with a wall clock, with no second hand. 32-bit IDE drivers sped up access times quite a bit.

Then when actual 32 bit software came out... Mmmmm, delicious.

Can't wait until 64 bit is prime time.
 
Phoenix86 said:
Folks, if you don't remember transitioning from 16-bit to 32-bit drivers, well you just aren't old enough. :p

You could measure the difference in boot times with a wall clock, with no second hand. 32-bit IDE drivers sped up access times quite a bit.

Then when actual 32 bit software came out... Mmmmm, delicious.
to
Can't wait until 64 bit is prime time.
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8088 to 8086 :cool:
 
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