Desktops usually no; Servers yes.

Posted Dec 10, 2004 22:31 UTC (Fri) by evgeny (subscriber, #774)
In reply to: Desktops usually no; Servers yes. by jzbiciak
Parent article: Fedora Core 3 on AMD64

> What does md5sum have to do with floating point?

Not with FP; with (64bit) long longs. Hmm, or, at least, that was my impression. I did some benchmarks a year ago and noticed that a couple of utilites worked much better on amd64 than on x86; and it seemed it was related to the use of 64bit variables/structs..

> The speedup on md5sum probably comes from doubling the number of integer registers, and thereby reducing register spills to the stack.

Probably you're right.

> One area floating point code will see speedups is in block copies.

That's definitely not the case with my numbercrunching codes. Furthermore, running 32bit exec under 64bit kernel takes exactly twice more CPU time than the 64bit executable.