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    64 bit Leopard

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by Tolland, Jan 14, 2007.

  1. Tolland

    Tolland Notebook Enthusiast

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    As the title says...? what's 64 bit mean in an operating system?
     
    Tolland, Jan 14, 2007
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  2. jimboutilier

    jimboutilier Notebook Evangelist NBR Reviewer

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    The main benefit a user can see is FASTER. The amount of memory a program can address gets bigger and the amount of data that can be transfered or acted on in a single operation gets bigger. Not all programs benefit to the same degree, but in theory (not often in practice) you could see programs executing twice as fast

    The OS and drivers included with the OS will benefit immediately from this, as will any calls to these things, but applications will have to be recompiled to maximize their own benefits (are we going to see universal binaries for PPC, Intel32 and Intel64 eventually?) On the down side programs usually get bigger and take up more space and memory.

    Hope that helps.
     
    jimboutilier, Jan 14, 2007
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