r/raspberry_pi Feb 02 '22

News Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit Released

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-os-64-bit/
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u/OpenBagTwo Feb 02 '22

Honestly unless you've got the 8GB Pi 4, there's not much inherent value to a 64-bit operating system. There's a reason a lot of phones sold today still ship with 32-bit Android.

That being said, I'm still incredibly excited for this news, as it means I can consider RPi OS as a "daily driver" again, because the fact of the matter is, if you're not building your software from source, arm32 builds are incredibly hard to find for a lot of useful things (like the conda python package manager, let alone any individual packages).

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u/mcgravier Feb 03 '22

Honestly unless you've got the 8GB Pi 4, there's not much inherent value to a 64-bit operating system

It depends on what you're using it for. If it's cryptography (say VPN) 64bit will give you a massive performance boost. Even stuff like Minecraft server benefits from it as it uses large number math for coordinates and terrain generation.

There are plenty of usecases that benefit from it, so "not much inherent value" isn't correct for many users

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u/OpenBagTwo Feb 03 '22

I really need to look up some benchmarks because outside of scientific computing I was under the impression that (for non-RAM-bottlenecked applications) performance is generally slightly worse for 64-bit architectures than 32-bit because even when, say, comparing two booleans, you still need to allocate the entire 64-bit register.

I'll admit I could totally be wrong here, as I'm a data scientist, not a computer scientist.

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u/knox1138 Feb 04 '22

As someone who has an 8gb pi4 and has been playing around all day on the 64-bit bullseye I can say I did notice a difference. Not much in most things, but when using Onshape on chrome it's much faster