x64 speed

[Robin Becker]

Whilst doing some portability testing with reportlab I noticed a strange speedup 
for our unittest suite with python2.5

host  win32 xp3 unittest time=42.2 seconds
vmware RHEL x64 unittest time=30.9 seconds

so it looks like the vmware emulated system is much faster. Is it the x64 
working faster at its design sizes or perhaps the compiler or could it be the 
vmware system caching all writes etc etc? For the red hat x64 build the only 
special configuration was to use ucs2

I know that the VT bit stuff has made virtualization much better, but this seems 
a bit weird.
-- 
Robin Becker