Dean Kent (dkent@realworldtech.com) on 5/13/07 wrote:
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>12) It makes sense that manufacturers of hardware and software would *want* everyone
>to be using 64-bit systems - because they don't *want* to have two versions of things.
>It is expensive! So I can fully understand why people in such positions would
>wave their hands around and say it is *required*.

(Note that whenever something is expensive for the manufacturers, it's generally the end users that actually pay for it.)

In our case I don't actually have any urgent plans to make the software itself 64 bits. 4GB is actually enough for our software, at least for a while. (By the time you get to over 2GB of data in our case the performance is the limiting factor, not the available memory.) The problem is that we can't get close to 2GB on a normal 32 bit Windows PC. The maximum possible project size available to the user is constrained by the software's ability to access memory, whereas running the same 32 bit software on a 64 bit OS the user is constrained by their own patience.

Now that we can advise customers to upgrade to a 64 bit PC, we can start simplifying code and increasing the performance by using more memory-intensive algorithms. It means that future versions will actually run out of memory earlier on a 32 bit platform, but they will run much better on a 64 bit platform and the code will be less buggy to boot.

The only problem is customers who aren't allowed to upgrade. (We've got a US govt customer who wasn't allowed to install XP x64 on his new top-of-the-range Dell workstation because his IT dept didn't want to support a "mixed environment".) Hopefully with Vista being surreptitiously shipped in 64 bit versions from the beginning (like my new notebook) that will be less of a problem than it was under XP.