           PERFORMANCE IMPLICATIONS OF MULTIPLE POINTER SIZES
 
 Jeffrey C. Mogul, Joel F. Bartlett, Robert N. Mayo, Amitabh Srivastava
       Digital Equipment Corporation Western Research Laboratory
 
                                ABSTRACT
 
  Many users need 64-bit architectures: 32-bit systems cannot support
the largest applications, and 64-bit systems perform better for some
applications.  However, performance on some other applications can
suffer from the use of large pointers; large pointers can also constrain
feasible problem size.  Such applications are best served by a 64-bit
machine that supports the use of both 32-bit and 64-bit pointer
variables.
 
  This paper analyzes several programs and programming techniques to
understand the performance implications of different pointer sizes.
Many (but not all) programs show small but definite performance
consequences, primarily due to cache and paging effects.

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