x86-64 on i386 (was Re: Promoting i386 version over x86_64?)

[drago01]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 10:28 PM, Paul Jakma <paul at dishone.st> wrote:

>  - I am incredulous at the people who keep arguing that "x86-64 is
>    better" because it has PC-relative addressing, or because the ABI
>    is pass-by-register by default. I am extremely sceptical that
>    these respondents would be able to distinguish between a 32bit
>    and a 64bit "cp" or "nautilus" or "ls" or "gnome-panel" or ... etc.
>
>    It'd be interesting to see if this applied even to browsers.
>    (E.g. Chrome on 32bit is extremely fast, hard to see that it'd
>     get much faster on 64. Firefox is slow on 64bit too).

Well while there was no x86_64 chromium build midori (which uses
webkit) was faster in every JS while the whole web was praising
google's V8 as the fastest JS engine ...
Once the 64bit chromium come out, this was indeed the case.

So a software that is supposed to be slower than another one was
faster only because it was running an x86_64 version.