Technical Articles

How does word length affect the performance and operation of a CPU?

About a year ago, I came across a question on Super User titled “How much faster is a 64-bit CPU than a 32-bit CPU?”, which was promptly closed and deleted since it’s a very open ended question. However, the author (a software developer) referred to benchmarks regarding system performance in 32-bit versus 64-bit. The purpose of this blog post is to investigate how the performance of a computer is affected, as a function of the word length.

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Fixing the XAnalogTV Screensaver

A few days ago, I discovered the awesome XAnalogTV screensaver included with XScreenSaver. I was very impressed with the visuals, which include a very accurate simulation of a conventional “tube” television implementing the analog NTSC TV standard. There was just one problem – I couldn’t get XAnalogTV to fill my screen: In the source code, the virtual "display" is forced to be within 15% of a standard 4:3 display. Any screen which is outside of this 15% range is just clipped, as shown in this image.

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