EVE General Discussion

This is a very good question it would be nice to have a 64 bit client.

I just instaled win 7 but i still have win xp 32 bit if i cant get it to work.

I do believe one of the big problems with spreading nodes over multiple cores is that it causes the server to process actions out of order. That is not to say that this problem is unsolvable, but I imagine it would take quite a lot of :effort: to rewrite the core game code to be usable across multiple cores.

Alright everybody, time for a quick and dirty 101 on how 64-bit processors, instruction sets, memory pointers, and operating systems work. (Trust me, I'm a CS Ed. Major... Although I'm tired right now.)

We're talking about two different things here: Processors, and operating systems.

Processors have been working in 64 bit for ages. IIRC, Althlon XP-era chips were 64 bit, but I may be mistaken. It might have been the generation after that. Definitely way back on the socket 939 architecture.

In any case, a 64-bit processor can process both 32 and 64 bit instructions equally well. It doesn't even really care all that much. It can flip between the two with no problem, so a 64-bit processor is almost a given now. Regardless of physical and logical cores (hyperthreaded vs. non-hyperthreaded, etc.) we're not worried about that.

The real issues come with 64-bit operating systems. They aren't as big a deal as they WERE, and really you shouldn't see any operational difference between a 64-bit operating system and a 32-bit operating system on the surface. The biggest differences are under the hood, and one of the biggest differences you'll see if you look is in memory usage.

There's a little catch to a 32-bit operating system. It can only use so much RAM. Each time your computer does... well, anything, it has to send an instruction in order to do it. Keep in mind, these instructions are tiny little steps. Move this little piece of data here, add this, AND this, OR that. Tiny tiny steps. Hundred, easily thousands of instructions can happen with just a single line of programming code.

Now, remember that the processor doesn't really care if it's getting instructions in 64 or 32 bit. It's just a machine that processes the instructions however it's told, and if it's handed a 32 bit instruction, it does what it does for 32 bit instructions. Same for 64-bit. However, the operating system has to worry about a bit more than that, because the operating system has the task of worrying about where everything is STORED. A processor just handles instructions handed to it. It's up to the operating system to keep track of where all the data it's giving and getting from the processor. The processor does all of the actual work, but it's just a mindless automaton, taking data from wherever it's told, following the instruction, then putting the data back, or moving it, or whatever. It doesn't actually look at what it's doing, it just does it.

So, if we assume that the processor just does mindless work and the OS keeps track of all of this work, the operating system stores all of this in memory. Now, it has to keep track of all that work stored in memory. It does this by addressing each block of memory much like we address houses on a street. This data lives here, and it takes up this much space, and right next door is an empty lot, then down the street some more is more data... Etc. It's address is only so big, and that address fits inside of the 32-bit instruction (32 1s and 0s long) to tell the processor where to get data, etc.

Well, here's were we run into a problem. In a 32-bit operating system, the addressability, that is, the maximum amount of addresses that the operating system can handle, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3GB of RAM. Any more, and the computer can't physically express where data would be stored. It's like if you ever see a young child start counting and then... not know what number comes next. The computer doesn't know what number is next, so it just ignores anything more than 3GB of RAM.

We fix this by simply giving the computer more room to give out more addresses. In a 64-bit operating system, the instruction is 64-bits long. This means that there's more room to give that bigger address in memory to the processor. The addressability goes up, and you can suddenly use more RAM then you'd ever really possibly need with computers today.

There is a downside though. These addresses are a lot bigger in a 64-bit operating system. Imagine if every phone number in the world went from being 7 digits long to 50 digits long. We'd need bigger phone books. Your computer needs a bigger address book to keep track of where it stored everything, and it HAS to have this. Additionally, not only does your computer have an address book of where it's stored everything, programs also have address books that tell them where program resources are stored in the computer. All of these address books are suddenly a lot bigger.

You see this reflected in memory usage as a user. On a 32-bit operating system, EVE uses 100-150MB or whatever. On a 64-bit operating system, it uses 500. This is because every time the computer or the program needs to refer to another piece of data, the actual address to know where it's stored is a lot bigger. The program isn't taking up any more RAM, but the amount of information needed to properly express where it all stored IS.

TL;DR: A 64-bit processor doesn't really matter. They've had those for years. A 64-bit operating system should run EVE just fine, although it'll use more memory because of 64-bit memory addresses being physically bigger. Either way, you should be able to enjoy EVE with any 64-bit processor (or 32-bit, although you'd be on one venerable machine...) and with a 32 or 64-bit operating system. EVE isn't likely to build a native 64-bit version anytime soon. It's just not necessary.

Why would CCP use processors that are (a) not (yet) well supported by their operating system's scheduler and have (b) pretty poor single-core performance and only shine when given multi-threaded workloads?