64-bit World of Warcraft game client now available for testing

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

1-09-2012 @ 9:16PM

Monion said...

Not only does it not take longer to decode a 64 bit instruction than a 32 bit instruction, it takes the same amount of time to read them from memory. 64 bit processors load up 64 bit registers by reading out 64 bit values at a time. A 32 bit instruction is just going to go through the WOW64 layer on Windows (which allows 32 bit instructions to be executed on a 64 bit processor), which means that it actually takes *longer* to execute a 32 bit program than the same 64 bit program on a 64 bit version of Windows (I can only assume Linux and MacOS do something simliar from an translation layer standpoint).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

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