64!!! two excellent articles on 64 and memory usage

Vista 64 is blossoming! http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=506 and here: http://www.dailytech.com/People+Fi [...] e12568.htm and (thanks scotteq) here http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3- [...] 1001_3-0-5

It's really coming and it's going to be big. I'd go so far as to say it appears that 64 bit is finally hitting critical mass and is over the hump! Something we have all been anticipating ever since AMD came out with mainstream 64 bit CPUs around five years ago. Even the OEMs are coming on and it appears it is just a matter of a very short time that 64 bit will be mainstream on new PCs. The drivers are excellent, 32 bit software runs on it and at this point there are just a few holdout devices and software that won't work properly. Surely even these will now come into line with the OEMs pushing Vista 64 big time.

The ability to address large quantities of RAM is what is driving this at the moment but it is also clear that software companies such as Adobe are preparing 64 bit versions which will actually run in 64 bit mode and thus run very significantly faster than their 32 bit vers. Surely many more software makers will follow suite.

Anyway you will be seeing a lot coming out about this in the coming weeks. Here are two new articles on 64 bit and memory usage. The first is from the noted guru Mark Russinovich and it's all about the finer points of the 4 gig limit and PAE etc.. http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/ Thankfully it's not TOO technical so people like me who do not have CS degrees can make sense of it.

The second is by the author and Zdnet writer/blogger Ed Bott. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=511 It's called "You've got Vista 64 questions, I've got answers" In it he specifically address (among a few other popular questions) a question yours truly posed to him on another blog here; http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-123 [...] eID=946442 as to whether or not, when running the same processes, x64 consumes more RAM than 32 bit. According to him it does, but only marginally more. Some people have suggested that Vista 64 consumes way more RAM, as much as 2x that of 32 bit and I think it is very clear this is erroneous.

Interesting stuff.