Lutz-Peter Hooge <lpv### [at] gmxde> wrote:
> Well, he did say that he has an AMD64, so he probably only cares about 
> that, not about 64bit in general.

  If he has an AMD64 then he will probably benefit from a 64-bit version
of POV-Ray for the reason I explained before: AFAIK for some reason 32-bit
code does not run as fast as 64-bit code in this processor. (But this has
nothing to do with 64-bit code per se being generally faster than 32-bit
code, but because of the optimization strategies of the processor.)

  I find it odd that AMD made this decision. Other examples of 32/64 bits
processors are the Sun UltraSparc and the G5 processor of Macintoshes.
In both of them the processor has been fully optimized for both 32-bit and
64-bit code execution and there isn't any drastic difference between the
two (even though 64-bit code is generally a few percents slower because
the code takes more space and fills caches a bit faster).

  Of course what AMD did is much much better than what Intel did...

> Every time someone here asks about an AMD64 version they get replies
> that 64bit versions in general won't be of much use, but it seems so far
> nobody has ACTUALLY compiled it for AMD64 and tried it... *sigh*

  What I choke at is when people talk as if 64-bit code would have something
magical which would make POV-Ray drastically faster. I just asked exactly
what these people are expecting. Why would it be faster?

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