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Comment by pwinwood | Hacker News Reader

To start the ARM processor in aarch64 (64bit) mode is just a question of setting the flag in the arm control (arm_control=0x0200) register to 0x0200 in the config.txt. see the discussion at https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=1379.... I don't think it will give much of a benefit over aarch32 mode (arm_control=0x0000) because of the limited memory.

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> I don't think it will give much of a benefit over aarch32 mode (arm_control=0x0000) because of the limited memory.

Some software requires 64-bit, like the Atom editor.

Does the Pi even have enough RAM to run Atom? I can't imagine that being a pleasant experience.

I don't use atom, what about it is irredeemably 64-bit?

All I know about Atom is that people come on the forum and report that they can't get it to work. Then they are told that the core team has no plan to support it. I guess there could be a pull request.

I myself am curious as to why something would not work. There must be new features in the 64-bit architecture.

Does Atom support anything besides x86? Does the editor actually need to run on a 64-bit architecture, or is that just the only one that they produce official builds for?

I don't know off-hand any software specifically built for aarch64 that couldn't be compiled for aarch32 as well. I'd be interested in hearing about it though, and what 64-bit provides that 32-bit doesn't, when we're talking about a device with under 4GB of memory anyhow.

"I don't think it will give much of a benefit over aarch32 mode (arm_control=0x0000) because of the limited memory."

I was also under that impression, but then again I'm not really a HW guy. But reading this thread (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=1382...) shows that I was wrong with thinking that 64Bit was only a RAM benefit.

Somebody tested the RPI against another board that also has the Cortex-A53 processor and saw in some cases some dramatic improvements (3x the performance). Very interesting read.

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