Athlon 64

I recently heard that you shouldn't buy an Athlon 64 until a few years time when they'll have a compatible operating system and when they're compatible with games. Is this true, or is someone having me on?

 

It will work with everything now, but few will see much if any difference without a 64 bit program to take advantage. It's more for bragging rights than for any performance advantage, in my opinion. There is a beta for a 64 bit Windows OS, but is has a lot of bugs in it. You should wait for everyone else to catch up before you buy one, though.

 

ok cheers, you're helping me alot at the moment!
i'll get myself an AMD 3000 just to stay in my budget.

 

I guess it depends what you're wanting to run on the processor as to whether you will notice it.
If I remember my Uni lessons correctly the 'bit' size of the processor (eg 64) is the size of the address bus and data bus. Durring the Fetch Execute Cycle of a processor where it gets its commands and executes them if a command is longer than the busses (eg a command 32 bits in length tries to go on a 16 bit processor) then the processor has to loop its Fetch Execute cycle to get both parts of the command and there is a performance hit.
I guess most operating systems are currently using smaller commands which are fine for current processors, and its true what Just Playin said above about not really seeing the benefits till developers take advantage of it.

I believe installing Gen Too on the system with a 64 bit processor will take full advantage of it and get a performance gain.... not tested that so don't know how true it is or how much the gain is...
btw my knowledge above is rusty from years of neglect and could be slightly, or even blatantly wrong - its just how I understand things right now