x64 speed

[Paul Rubin]

Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> writes:
> 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

You have to control all these variables separately in order to know.
But, 64 bit code is in general faster than 32 bit code when properly
compiled: more cpu registers, wider moves when copying large blocks of
data, floating point registers instead of the legacy stack-oriented
FPU, etc.