Ableton Forum

Im currently running Live8/9 x86 on win7 x64.

Am I Right in thinking I will not experience any cpu improvement using 64bit Live, because It does not take advantage of the 4 extra virtual cores in the i7 cpu?

My understanding is that 64-bit functionality only allows the program to access more than 4GB of ram, which will be great for handling very large sets with lots of samples. If anyone can shine some light on other improvements please let me know.

That is my understanding as well.
Because Live can use more memory things may run faster and smoother.
Especially big live sets.
And there *might* be fewer crashes (if you've had those) caused by running out of memory.

^ yep.

the advantage is in the RAM not the CPU.
obviously, having a faster CPU is better/faster, but you don't need a special version of Live to gain that benefit.

32Bit means a address space of 2^32 (= 4294967296 Byte = 4194304 KB = 4096 MB = 4GB). 64Bit obviously 2^64 (= 16 000 000 000GB = 16EB). Enough to store a lot of samples

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exbibyte

Am I Right in thinking I will not experience any cpu improvement using 64bit Live, because It does not take advantage of the 4 extra virtual cores in the i7 cpu?

Live 8 or 9 does not use hyperthreading for the audio engine. That means Live only uses the 4-cores of quad core i7 processors and not the 4 additional virtual cores. But your OS or other applications running in the background does.