64bit CPUs

[Allen]

At 10:54 5/2/2005, Sten Daniel Sørsdal wrote:
>Mike Tancsa wrote:
> > A somewhat obvious question to some perhaps, but what server application
> > mix on FreeBSD today sees an improvement using 64bit CPUs ?  In my ISP
> > centric world, my big apps are BIND, IMAP/POP3, httpd via apache, SMTP,
> > AV and SPAM scanning, and firewalls/routing.  Apart from larger RAM, why
> > would these benefit from the 64bit world ?  Or would they ?
>
>Any application that would benefit from being able to copy 64 bits at a
>time, i assume. Video applications and perhaps some encryption
>applications. Perhaps IPv6 core would have a slight benefit (although
>probably not with current code). Almost all the applications that you
>mention are doing mostly string operations (afaik). Perhaps VPN tunnels
>could benefit (unless of course you use hardware vpns like we do).

The real benefit for ISP servers comes in from the 64bit address space, not 
the 64bit registers, though they can help out occasionally in those 
workloads as you mentioned.

Having 1MB+ of L2 cache, and supporting 20+GB of memory are the real wins 
in your case.