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Comment by gavaw | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure those options will be dog slow and unreliable.

I buy wintel so I can run my software from 15 years ago without interference. Literally the only reason I don't buy a mac. If they want to take that away, well, good luck to them

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Considering Intel is merely considering it at this stage means they're probably still several years away from actually releasing chips without 16/32-bit support.

By that time, CPUs will be faster, and Intel will have had plenty of time to figure out the emulation layer.

These days, how much performance-critical software is even being built in 32-bit?

> These days, how much performance-critical software is even being built in 32-bit?

I think the better question is how much performance critical software built in 32 bit is still relied on, and may potentially outlive hardware with 32 bit support

If it's old, even with emulation it'd have a good chance to be as fast or faster than on its original target chips. So you'd need to not only rely on it, but also be demanding more from it over time. And given that you're running 32-bit software in a 32-bit vm on a 64-bit cpu in the first place (in a scenario where you're spending significant amounts of time in ring 0!), you clearly do not really care about performance anyway.

Everything is performance-critical. I buy new hardware so it runs my software as fast as it can. Why would I upgrade my CPU if I knew my programs would start running slower?

I completely agree. I still run Windows 7 on most of my systems (and please ... not interested in hearing any "bot farm" or other specious bullshit about how my machines have been Taken Over By Hackers!), and almost all of the very high quality software I use is 32-bit, because the 64-bit versions either don't exist or are burning dumpster fires.

Example? Lately I've been doing a lot of video transcoding with ffmpeg. The latest 64-bit version running under Windows 11 is lucky to average 10 to 14 frames per second. The last 32-bit version of ffmpeg running on Windows 7 does 64 frames per second or better.

In every case that comes to mind, the 32-bit versions of the applications I use far outperform the 64-bit versions. The only exception I can think of at the moment is Notepad++. NP++ is just plain awesome as a 64-bit application!

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