32-bit vs. 64-bit Benchmarks

[joshuapurcell]

I found a link to this PDF on the Ubuntu forums, and I thought it was right up our alley here at Phoronix. It would be cool to have possibly a more detailed, verifiable benchmark performed along these same lines. Here' the link:
http://art-blog.no-ip.info/files/amd64vsi386.pdf

I'm going to install Ubuntu 64-bit once I have a weekend to mess with it. Post if this link stops working anytime soon... I'll put the file up somewhere and change the link.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by joshuapurcell

I'll put the file up somewhere and change the link.

The link died, at least temporarily, when I was in the middle of downloading it... Looks like I'll just have to run my own tests

[joshuapurcell]

Originally Posted by Michael

The link died, at least temporarily, when I was in the middle of downloading it... Looks like I'll just have to run my own tests

That's what I was hoping ... I'm up at work right now, but I'll get this file uploaded to some location and provide a link hopefully later tonight so you can see what this file looks like.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by joshuapurcell

That's what I was hoping ... I'm up at work right now, but I'll get this file uploaded to some location and provide a link hopefully later tonight so you can see what this file looks like.

I'll see that such a i386 vs. x86_64 comparison gets completed before the New Year... Since it's the holidays, Ubuntu may be used for a change instead of Fedora.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by Michael

I'll see that such a i386 vs. x86_64 comparison gets completed before the New Year... Since it's the holidays, Ubuntu may be used for a change instead of Fedora.

Pardon my last statement, I may prepare for 32-bit and 64-bit tests on both Fedora and Ubuntu.

[Michael]

While 64-bit support is now considered common for both Intel and AMD processors, many Linux (as well as Windows) users are uncertain whether to use a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system with there being advantages for both paths. With this being the last Phoronix article for 2006, we decided to take this opportunity to look at the common question of whether to use 32-bit or 64-bit software. In this article, we will be comparing the i386 and x86_64 performance with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 1 to see how the numbers truly stack up.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=8325

If anyone is interested in any other benchmarks just let me know.

[Fragadelic]

Not much benefit in running 64-bit at the moment which is the same thing I found myself. The only difference I found was encoding video was a bit faster on 64-but but everything else was pretty much the same like your article.

This leads me to believe that most code is not optimized enough for 64-bit yet.

Hopefully this will eventually change.

[[Knuckles]]

Thanks for the benchmarking, but could you try to repeat some of the tests from the pdf that have a greater "gain %"?
That way we would get an idea if the pdf results are just "strange" -- e.g. maybe the fact that the testing was done using livecd's somehow influenced the results, or if the apps chosen are more prone to speeding up on x86_64.

[feight]

Appreciate the benchmark testing. I had no idea the differences were so slight even with 64bit enabled programs. I knew the advantage was mostly in number crunching because of the increased ram usage but I think I will stop fiddling with x86_64 for a bit as I'm not a coder or a tester.

It's probably for the best; it generally just causes me grief because of the codec/flash forced architectures and croots. These benchmarks are all the more valid to me because Ubuntu is my distro.

[joshuapurcell]

Way to go on the benchmarks, thanks for posting this. I'll be going with the Edgy 64-bit version once I get some time to go through the install. Here's a little more information on why I'll be going with a 64-bit OS (copied from another post I made a couple of weeks ago):

I've made some notes on what different OSes see as far as memory goes on my system. I should say the BIOS always says 4193216K unless I disable 'Memory Hole Remapping' (which it then reports 3327MB some reason). The following numbers are all taken from within the OS while the BIOS says 4GB:
Edgy 64-bit: 4047512K
Edgy 32-bit: 3369216K
WinXP 32-bit: 3406252K

Edgy64 shows the most memory at around 3.8GB (still not the full 4GB for some reason), but Edgy32 doesn't even see as much as WinXP! I didn't have WinXP 64-bit to test. I tried installing Feisty64 from the alternate CD, but I had problems getting the partition setup in the same way that I had Edgy (with LVM and software RAID being used)... I'll test out Feisty64 most likely with the next release (Herd 2). I also want to see what other Linux distributions with different kernels detect at some point.