[X4U] Tiger & 64-Bit Applications...

[DZ-Jay]

On Apr 14, 2005, at 13:02, Michael Winter wrote:
>
> IMO 64 bit only does two things. 1) Increases the amount of memory 
> that can be addressed and 2) makes it easier (and faster) to handle 
> data that does require more than 32 bits. Tiger does all that when 
> necessary.

I read somewhere, from an Apple developer, that the internal graphics 
engine, math APIs, and things like that will use 64-bits -- you know, 
the bits that actually could use it -- but that the general 
applications that come with OSX (Mail, Safari, etc.) will not.  Part of 
the problem is that, as you mentioned, changing them to 64-bits would 
actually make them slower -- because, since they depend so much on the 
API abstractions, they use a lot of pointer and memory references, 
which, being doubled in size in 64-bits, ends up exhausting the memory 
cache unnecessarily, without any significant performance improvements.

	dZ.