[ntp:questions] Dual-core systems - AMD - Windows Vista

David J Taylor david-taylor at blueyonder.not-this-bit.nor-this-bit.co.uk
Mon Dec 3 15:39:12 UTC 2007


Martin Burnicki wrote:
> Danny,
>
> Danny Mayer wrote:
>> David J Taylor wrote:
>>> The version I'm testing is the 32-bit version of Vista, albeit on a
>>> 64-bit
>>> capable CPU.  64-bit can be a pain though for subtle errors, I
>>> appreciate.
>>>
>>
>> That's a problem. There are even more subtle issues when you run a
>> 32-bit O/S on a 64-bit system. I don't think we can even try to
>> support that since there are likely to be too many unknowns. It's a
>> very nasty mix.
>
> I don't think there's a basic problem if you run a 32 bit OS on a 64
> bit hardware. AFAIK the AMD64 platform is backward compatible with 32
> bit OSs. W2k is running fine on a AMD64 machine here, and there are
> absolutely no problems.

Agreed.

> In one of his earlier posts David mentioned that there were no
> problems when he was running WXP on that machine.

Correct.

> I would rather expect some possible problems if you run a 64 bit OS
> (WXP x64 or Vista x64) on a 64 bit hardware, and then run a 32 bit
> application under that 64 bit OS, if the 32 bit compatibility layer
> of the OS has not been implemented properly.
>
>>> I didn't think that a 64-bit version of NTP was included in the
>>> Meinberg distribution.
>
> I don't think it would make much sense (or would be even possible) to
> run a program compiled for a 64 bit target OS on a 32 bit OS, just
> because the hardware is 64 bit.
>
>
> Martin

No, I was meaning a native 64-bit version of ntp to run under 64-bit Vista 
(or XP).  I would suspect that the extra OS layer implementing the 32-bit 
calls on the 64-bit native OS would lose some accuracy.  But that's not 
the order of magnitude of the error I'm seeing.

Thanks,
David 





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