Quote Originally Posted by schmidtbag View Post
when i was using the term register i was referring to the cpu itself, ram has little to do with registers. i guess i should've been more specific where the jugs are the amount of cpu registers and the contents are how many registers are used. I was pretty tired when i wrote that analogy. so does that change anything? i think i understand what you're trying to say now but you're focusing more on the userspace level, which is generally what uses up the most memory but doesn't define much of what happens to it at the architectural level; the architectural level is the important part because thats why 64 bit is often considered to be more memory consuming.
I'm not sure we're on the same page here I was under the impression that when people refer to memory consumption they're primarily concerned about ram, not cpu registers. This is also where the reported 15-20% increase in memory consumption comes from.

Are you saying that 32 bit on a 64 bit architecture kind of "wastes" registers because data is only using half of the space available in each register? I haven't written assembler code in some time (and never on 64 bit architecture) but afair a register is either in use or it's not, which means it shouldn't matter how much data it contains. Neither should a 64 bit value use more registers, because on 64 bit architecture all registers are 64 bit wide. The only part of a cpu which could be affected is its cache, which can only store half as many 64 bit values as 32 bit values. Long story short, I'm still confused what you're trying to say