[PLUG] 32-bit vs. 64-bit: Decision Criteria

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Rich" == Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> writes:

Rich>    Tools I use like GRASS, R, LaTeX, PSTricks are not considered
Rich> heavy computing tools.

Back when I was using it, R was an in-memory statistical tool.  That
is, you needed to load your entire dataset into memory prior to
executing the statistical calculation.  On top of which, the in-memory
representation of the data inflated the in-memory size by a
substantial factor.  64-bit might well have some advantages here.

I am running 64-bit on all my 64-bit capable devices and have yet to
encounter any substantial difficulty.  In the early days, there were
32-bit applications that had some trouble, but these days that case is
pretty well handled by the distributions.

We recently encountered an issue where a particular tool was 64-bit
only, I think maybe the Android SDK, and we (not me personally!) had
installed 32-bit Gentoo on the 64-bit box we'd want to use it on.
Oops.

My advice is, go 64-bit when you can.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net