Will ever be a 64bit version?
I may be wrong, but I don’t think there would be any advantages to going to 64bit on a router.. iirc 64bit is mainly for addressing over 4 gigs of memory..
-Gerard
If it is as you say, why the 64bit servers (with 64bit linux) are more performance?(with the same amount of memory,even in windows)?
Wikipedia:
Pros and cons
A common misconception is that 64-bit architectures are no better than 32-bit architectures unless the computer has more than 4 GB of memory. This is not entirely true:
- Some operating systems reserve portions of process address space for OS use, effectively reducing the total address space available for mapping memory for user programs. For instance, Windows XP DLLs and userland OS components are mapped into each process’s address space, leaving only 2 to 3.8 GB (depending on the settings) address space available, even if the computer has 4 GB of RAM. This restriction is not present in 64-bit Windows.
- Memory mapping of files is becoming less useful with 32-bit architectures, especially with the introduction of relatively cheap recordable DVD technology. A 4 GB file is no longer uncommon, and such large files cannot be memory mapped easily to 32-bit architectures; only a region of the file can be mapped into the address space, and to access such a file by memory mapping, those regions will have to be mapped into and out of the address space as needed. This is an issue, as memory mapping remains one of the most efficient disk-to-memory methods, when properly implemented by the OS.
- There may be other incidental advantages as a result of the transition - for example, in the case of x86-64 compared to x86, twice as many registers are available for programmer use.
The main disadvantage of 64-bit architectures is that relative to 32-bit architectures the same data occupies slightly more space in memory (due to swollen pointers and possibly other types and alignment padding). This increases the memory requirements of a given process and can have implications for efficient processor cache utilization. Maintaining a partial 32-bit model is one way to handle this and is in general reasonably effective. In fact, the highly performance-oriented z/OS operating system takes this approach currently, requiring program code to reside in any number of 32-bit address spaces while data objects can (optionally) reside in 64-bit regions.
Currently, most commercial software is built as 32-bit code, not 64-bit code, so it can’t take advantage of the larger 64-bit address space or wider 64-bit registers and data paths on 64-bit processors, or, on x86 processors, the additional registers in 64-bit mode. However, users of free or open source operating systems have been able to use exclusive 64-bit computing environments for years. Not all such applications require a large address space or manipulate 64-bit data items, so they wouldn’t benefit from the larger address space or wider registers and data paths; the main benefit to 64-bit versions of applications that wouldn’t benefit from them would be that x86 versions would be able to use more registers.
I still don’t think there would be enough of a performance gain if any to make it worth the trouble..
-Gerard
After all, it’s all about evolution…
i think mikrotik will make 64 bit version of routeros when it makes routerboard with 64 bit processor
you are 100% right Alex - good point!
it’s evolution for other kinds of systems. router’s won’t have any gain from this.
I’d like to put 8/16 gig or ram in my router to use the web proxy with all that ram 
There are MANY algorythms which would benefit greatly from being written to 64bit architecture.
Encrytion, Table lookups, Table indexing, etc., etc.
Huge gains are acheivable.
That said, most programmers today still have their 16 and 32bit hats on, and many still use precanned algos from the 8bit days.
This coming from someone who has been reverse engineering device drivers since the late 80s.