On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, rda@lemma-one.com wrote:
Is there any reason for or against compiling Poly/ML for the 32 bit architecture?
Although 64bit support has been available for approx. 2 years -- thanks to all the efforts by David Matthews -- we currently still ship things precompiled for 32bit by default. This is a bit faster, because data size is only half of 64bit.
Nonetheless, we are already pretty close to the turning point towards 64bit: parallel processing on multicore machines essentially requires to scale up heap memory size with the number of cores. The 32bit platform reaches its natural performance end with approx. 4 cores. Running Isabelle on 16 cores typically requires 16-32 GB memory, and 64bit is then the only way.
Makarius