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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: New Performance Panoramas A Memory Address Space Crash Course System Configuration Disk Caching? System Memory Density Impact WoW, WinXP and WinXP-64 Conclusion Discuss this article here:
Panorama Factory and the $64-bit Question What's in a Benchmark...?
(Review by MS, September 2, 2004)

32-bit vs 64-bit Computing

Aside from the somewhat dubious issue of memory space addressabilty in 32-bit vs. 64-bit environments, the obvious question we were asking in this write-up was whether there is any performance increase by migrating from 32-bit to 64-bits. One issue we carefully avoided thus far in this respect concerns the question whether any 32-bit application running in a Windows-on-Windows (WoW) interface will accurately represent the actual performance of the same application in a native 32-bit -WindowsXP environment. In a nutshell, the answer is "no". WoW will be running slower than native WindowsXP but --- the differences are somewhat negligible. All benchmarks were run with 2 GB of memory to exclude the impact of HDD caching.

           

Left: 32-bit version of Panorama Factory running in WoW (blue) compared to native 32-bit WinXP (red); Native WindowsXP (32) is marginally faster than the 32-bit application running in a WoW environment but the differences are not big enough to emphasize them.

Center: 64-bit (green) vs 32-bit (WoW; red) version of Panorama Factory in WinXP-64-bit. Runtime in seconds, lower is better. The 64-bit version is clearly faster than the 32-bit version. The comparsion numbers are averages of 3 runs each with the WoW version used as baseline (which is legitimate considering that there is hardly a difference between WoW and WinXP32.

Right: Relative performance increase of the individual tasks in the 64-bit version of PanoramaFactory. A value of "1" indicates that there is no increase in performance, a positive value shows the 64-version ahead, a negative value indicates the 32-bit version being faster.

Interestingly, increasing the system memory from 1 GB to 2GB yielded a similar performance gain as migration from 32-bit to 64 bit....

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