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Gaming - x86-64 vs x64 - View Post

walsufnir on 08 February 2014
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Pemalite said:
walsufnir said:
Pemalite said:
jack100 said:

I just watch the Wii U "Five" episode from ZyroXZ2, not sure if that is your name on this forum, but good job.

Anyways, as I forgot he said that the ps4 and xbox 1 uses a x86 prcessor, yet I remember that you can ONLY use about 4 gigs on RAM, and that includes GPU RAM.  So I was thinking, do they stick 8 gigs on RAM into each console and 4 gigs NEVER gets used. I remember this cause I had a 12 gig PC and had xp 32bit and I could only see like 4 gigs, so I had to upgrade to a 64 bit operating system.  So I was wondering how do they use 8 gigs each if x86 can only use 4 gigs.

I did a little research and found the x86-64, which theorically see 128 GIGS on RAM.  Of course I was confused a little since I haven't done hardware stuff in a while.  More reseatrch revealed that x84-62 uses twice as much CPU power as a X64 processor since you constantly have to swap bits in the RAM on x86-64.

So doesn't that mean the PS4 and the xbox 1, which has 8 cores, with 2 gigs reserved for the OS and 6 cores left.  Isn't the 6 cores be equivalent to 3 cores since x86-64 has to use twice as much power?  If it was an x64 architecture, then it could maximize all 6 cores whereas x86-64 uses much more power and can be cut in half.  Also if they want to maximize the CPU power the DEV eventaully have to learn x64 platform at least for the next generation......which they now won't learn.

JUst ranting, maybe I'm forgetting something.  Just my 2 cents.

Converesly, Windows 32bit can address larger amounts of memory than that via the PAE extension which stands for Physical Address Extension, basically it extends the 32bit address space to 36bit, 40bit, 48bit and potentially 52bit.
48bit for instance would allow a 32bit PC to address 256 Terabytes of Ram.

 

There are only few PAE enabled Windows available. Well, to be correct, many have it enabled but are intentionally limited:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Microsoft_Windows

Not to mention it can create "unforseen" problems, hence why it wasn't so widely used in the PC space.
But it is possible and not really a consiquence in a fixed platform such as a console if they were to hypothetically use it, they don't have decades worth of backwards compatability to worry about.

The PS4 and Xbox One though would indeed be using 64bit, because of the extra registers and such.

 

We ran a lot of Linux servers with PAE-enabled kernels for several years, worked without any problems. Not sure about Windows, though...