64-bit - How will this improve performance?
Well we have heard that this great new CPU supports 64-bit processes and is all marvellous and wonderful, but how does moving to 64-bit actually help the end user. Currently all the Apps that you are using are 32-bit, the operating system you are likely to be using is also 32-bit. So at the moment the benefits are minimal. Obviously the CPU will work and is faster than the Athlon XP's of any kind. bit in the 32-bit world the only real benefit is the onboard memory controller and higher clock speeds, these have nothing to do with the 64-bit nature of the CPU.
The release of Win64 or whatever Microsoft decide they wish to call it, will alter things round a little bit. Currently you have a memory limit of 4Gb set by Windows, however only 2Gb of this can be used by a single process, Windows reserves anything over this. By using the Athlon64 CPU your 32-bit applications will be able to utilize the full 4Gb of memory available to it. High memory tasks will run a great deal more smoothly. 32-bit applications would have to be patched in order to use this however. This does rely on the software companies updating their programs and releasing a patch.
The scenario that the manufacturers are trying to get to is running a 64-bit application under a 64-bit OS, here the OS would allocate all the available memory and the Apps would have more registers to utilise. The expectation is that for non-memory bound applications you will see an increase of about 10-20% for memory bound applications (Apps limited by the memory you have available) The process will me much more efficient. Less swapping to hard disk and more information stored directly in memory.