>
> Below you can see results in seconds of run_testsuite();
> for Maxima 5.12 on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux 2.6.18 both running on
> Athlon 64 X2 5600+ with 4Gb RAM (same machine, multi-boot):
Shouldn't there be three columns here? One for 32-bit, one for 32-bit Lisp
running on 64-bit OS, one for 64-bit Lisp running on 64-bit OS. If the Lisp
is not 64-bit, the only advantage a 64-bit OS/hardware has is in supporting
more physical memory. Does Maxima run on any 64-bit Lisp implementations?
The advantage of course is the larger address space, but I wonder how many
symbolic problems can actually use more than 4GB effectively.
In any case, I'd think that 64-bit implementations would slow down Lisp
considerably by increasing the size of data, except for the very few
applications which are making very heavy use of large integers (bignums) and
bfloats. Floating-point is probably 64-bit on all platforms these days; I
guess some Lisps also use extended precision hardware support (Scieneer).
-s