Comments on: Why would anyone use a 32-bit OS in 2012?

By: TMP

TMP — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:06:58 +0000

cos 3+2=2+0+1+2

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:10:54 +0000

My laptop runs great on 4GB, with about 1GB free, and I’m doing a lot more than using a browser. But then again, I’m not using Firefox or Gnome 3, so I may not have the problems you have. The biggest process I am running has rsize of 232M right now, and most of that is shared.

I frankly don’t expect to need more than 4GB of RAM for the foreseeable future. My computing memory usage has stayed about the same (if we omit Firefox, OpenOffice, and Gnome 3) for many years. I am not sure there is a reason that future software automatically has to be more bloated than present software. That seems especially true in mobile devices, where more RAM means more power draw and there’s a lot of effort invested in efficiency. The common wisdom that today’s programmers are careless with memory and CPU may not be universally true.

By: Jouni "rautamiekka" Järvinen

Jouni "rautamiekka" Järvinen — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:10:21 +0000

Finally someone with some sense in head ! This is the obvious explanation to why 32-bit is used.

By: Stewart Smith

Stewart Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:25:07 +0000

A mid-range phone will have 1GB RAM and a high end one will have 2GB. In 12 months or so, this will no doubt double.

This basically says that in 12 months or so, ARM will be 64bit on high end phones and tablets.

I struggle to think about coping with only 4GB of memory in a laptop… that’s about what a web browser uses these days.

By: hartmut

hartmut — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:51:46 +0000

@William

“and gets rid of the bad parts for systems with 4Gb or less”

wouldn’t that actually be “for processes that don’t need a 2/3/4GB+ address space”?

As far as i understood X32_ABI can be used on a per-process base on a x86_64 OS …