Are 64-bit processors "faster" than 32-bit ones, simply because they are 64-bits? [duplicate]

cpu memory cpu-architecture 32-bit 64-bit

Obviously, for any application with large memory requirements or involving many numbers larger than 2/4 billion, 64-bit is a huge win. For program instructions and integer calculation, which is a huge part of general computing, there is no intrinsic benefit for 64-bit. Because, honestly, who needs to count past 2/4 billion or keep track of more than the 32-bit-address-space-worth of RAM.

But why do we see such a speed up? Smart compilers. Compilers are always learning new tricks. Like why loop through and sum up 100 32-bit integers when instead you can add 50 void-casted 64-bit numbers and then add the 32-bits of each part of that "64-bit" number.

But the main contributing factor that answers "yes!" to your question is the wider data path access that 64-bit processors have to main memory.

For benchmarking and a discussion of differences in one architecture and then comparison to other architectures, please see:

http://zsmith.co/

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