View Full Version : Architecture
MuffinFlavored
11-22-2007, 01:34 PM
With an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, if I want the greatest performance, what would I do?
Would it be wise, for performance, to enable SMP?
i686?
x86_64?
Thank you.
Volkum
12-10-2007, 05:58 PM
Enabling SMP will allow you to use all the cores/processors in the system, so yes that would be advantageous in terms of performance.
i686 = 32 bit
x86_64 = 64 bit
Not really any performance difference in any apps the average user would be running
Depends on the applications. Enabling SMP makes tasks that are really single-threaded faster. Of course you lose a lot elsewhere :)
Normally 64 bit code is faster, but there are exceptions. Due to pointers being twice the size and some integers going from 32 to 64 bits (when C/C++ programmers just used "long") you might overrun memory, CPU caches or the TLB with a 64 bit version when you didn't in a 32 bit compiled version.