While for the most part that may be true for the majority of users, there
are applications where the added memory and address space would make a
significant difference, most notably where massive amounts of data requiring
extremely accurate calculations are slugged around. There are also a
significant number of businesses whose data mining operations, and on
occasion regular database requirements, would benefit from the extra hard
memory. Of course, a lot of those applications are already using existing
64-bit hardware and operating systems, so Microsoft and its toy operating
system isn't going to be making a great deal of headway there.

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
David Schwartz wrote:
That's the key difference between the availability of 64-bit
processors
and the introduction of 32-bit and 16-bit processors. When 32-bit
processors
and 16-bit processors were first available, there was already a huge
base of
software that could greatly benefit from the additional capability.
However,
there is very little currently existing software that can significantly
benefit from 64-bits processors. Few applications actually need to deal
with
numbers larger than a billion, whereas many applications need to deal
with
numbers larger than a hundred thousand.

In the case of x86 64-bits, the real gain is to be had from the
additional registers, and the onboard memory controller (in some cases).
Also some unrecompiled 32-bit apps can gain from having additional
address space specifically devoted to them and not shared with the OS,
which now has its own address space well out of the way of these apps.

Yousuf Khan