Re: Re: [OT] Laptop

[Jim Noble <yahoo-groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rob Lamb wrote:

> You're right but I thought that when WinXP 64 came out (and there's
> a beta download to try for a year) it would give a boost to what
> would then be an older laptop?


Possibly. It's not impossible that a 64-bit version would run slower
though - there's an overhead in to going to 64-bit. There are cunning
features of the architecture that will compensate though, but that will
be reliant on the developers driving the compilers correctly. I doubt
there will be much difference in performance though.

Chances are that unless there's a pressing need to run 64-bit native,
developers will just churn out 32-bit versions for as long as they can
get away with it ;-) (As a hardware engineer I'm obliged to have a low
opinion of softies, as a species ;-)

The big gain with 64-bit is the huuuge flat address space. Which is
kinda wasted when the machine only supports 2Gb of RAM ;-)

Opteron runs 32-bit code very well though, especially games, which are
often maths heavy - something it does especially well. I use opterons at
work a lot partly for just that reason (maths! not games ;-) They are
blindingly quick.

I noticed when I popped over to Costco at lunchtime that they had a 3GHz
P4 laptop (toshiba?) for about £999 ex VAT. Makes the Lidl one seem more
reasonable.

If it were me buying, then (IMHO) unless it was for gaming, I'd be
wondering if you could get more RAM, bigger HD, extra widgets etc with a
P4M based machine instead...?

HTH,

Jim