Paul Hopwood wrote:

JK wrote:

Which wouldn't be so bad if the Pentium 4 being discussed was a 64 bit one.
Unfortunately it is a 32 bit one. Assigning no extra value to the Athlon 64's
64 bit mode doesn't seem to make much sense. In 2005 many of those
who bought a high priced 32 bit processor in '04 might become upset
that they didn't use foresight and buy a 64 bit processor. I wonder what great
64 bit applications we will see in 2005. I wonder what 32 bit applications will
be ported to 64 bits and show tremendous improvements in performance
when the 64 bit is run compared to the 32 bit version on an Athlon 64
or Opteron. Here is a link to one application already out in 64 bits whose
64 bit version runs 25% faster than the 32 bit version on an Athlon 64.

Perhaps similar to the reaction of the "let's buy 64-bit because it's
the latest and greatest thing" brigade when technologies such as BTX,
PCI-Express, faster FSBs, new sockets etc hit the market en-mass in
2005 and render their "latest and greatest" machines obsolete. Then
they might well wonder why they didn't buy 32-bit machines, have
saving themselves some money and wait until they actually needed it?

Buying a low priced 32 bit Athlon XP or Sempron might make sense,
especially for someone who runs only business software. Buying a 32
bit Pentium 4 at around the price of an Athlon 64 doesn't make much
sense for most people(notice I said most people, as there will be a few
who will say that more than 50% of their pc usage is video editing, and
they have no plans to ever want to upgrade to 64 bit editing software).



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iv Paul iv