igor0
6
Very specific algorithms can benefit from having wider (and more) CPU registers, but…
- It’s not a very common case that the difference is significant
- You might have to write the implementation in assembler to have that advantage - when using a higher language (avast! is mostly written in C/C++), it depends on the compiler how it deals with the optimization - and it can easily happen that the 64bit version will actually be slower (some time ago, I did some benchmarks on the decompression algorithms, and for some archives the unpacking was a bit faster, but for some also a bit slower)
- The executables are a bit bigger, consuming more memory - which can cause slight slowdown, compared to 32bit version
- The limit for avast! (the weakest part of the chain) will usually be the data source (hard disk, network), not the CPU itself - so faster processing won’t really speed up the scanning