Just a quick question for the Gamedev community. What advantages, if any, does a 64bit PC provide for AI applications such as neural nets or genetic algorithms? I'm about to upgrade my laptop for uni this year, and am debating whether it's worth the extra money (roughly $2k with the systems I'm looking at) to invest in an AMD64 laptop (basically my current options are between a Dell 2.1GHz Centrino system or an AMD64 based system... probably from www.voodoopc.com, because I've been wanting an excuse to get a Voodoo laptop for ages ^.^) If anyone has any insight or any links, it'd be much appreciated.

Well the only real advantage of 64bit is that you can access more memory..
..and i doubt neural nets or genetic algorithms used for game development use so much memory that you need a 64bit processor

Also if clever coded (explicit for 64 bit) you could do 2 32 bit calculations in one 64 bit command... so double the speed with same frequence. if it is optimized for 64...

if you want the laptop for coding at university, i don't see any reason to have a 64 bit processor either, perhaps if you want to study the performance boost of a 64 bit processor against a 32 one... ;)

too many if's if you ask me :)

save the money and just buy a better pc in 2 years.

well, it should mean quicker processing, but what comes to mind for me is much faster game-board AI, especially chess (64-squares, bitboards).