Quote:
Anyway, what does 64-bit buy you on the Windows side?

From the Debian amd64 page: While architectures like sparc64 or powerpc64 [...] default to executing 32bit applications, amd64 defaults to 64bit binaries because of the performance benefits it offers in 64bit mode.

The "extra performance" is probably because you get more general-purpose registers in amd64 than you do in ia32, so you don't cane the memory system so badly.

Peter