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Windows Operating Systems Software Technology

Microsoft Is Finally Releasing a 64-Bit Version of OneDrive For Windows (engadget.com) 75

Posted by BeauHD from the better-late-than-never dept.
Microsoft is finally releasing a 64-bit version of OneDrive, roughly 14 years after the first 64-bit version of Windows was released. Engadget reports: In an announcement spotted by Windows guru Paul Thurrott, the company says the new version of OneDrive will help those who need to transfer large files or many files at the same time since 64-bit systems can access more resources than their 32-bit counterparts.

"We know this has been a long-awaited and highly requested feature, and we're thrilled to make it available for early access," the company said. "You can now download the 64-bit version for use with OneDrive work, school, and home accounts." One thing to note is the preview is currently only available on x64 installs of Windows. If you own a computer like the Surface Pro X -- and therefore have Windows 10 on ARM installed on your system -- you'll have to wait. Microsoft recommends you continue using the 32-bit version for the time being.
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Microsoft Is Finally Releasing a 64-Bit Version of OneDrive For Windows More

Microsoft Is Finally Releasing a 64-Bit Version of OneDrive For Windows

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  • Complete rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @05:12AM (#61254326) Homepage

    OneDrive will help those who need to transfer large files or many files at the same time since 64-bit systems can access more resources than their 32-bit counterparts.

    This is complete marking wankery. It will work exactly the same.

    (OneDrive doesn't need 4Gb RAM).

    • ...it spends most of it's time trying to send you to the Microsoft web site anyway and that depends on your browser.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      They will probably add a giant malloc to make the users get their 64 bits worth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      How fucked is your code if a) it can't just be recompiled as x64 and b) it needs >4GB of RAM to sync some files over a network?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jeremyp ( 130771 )

        a) is demonstrably not true because the macOS version is already 64 bit and has been at least since macOS went 64 bit only. Of course, the code base might be entirely different for the two products, but if I were writing it, only the UI parts would not be common to the two platforms.

        I suspect laziness rather than difficulty.

        b) is hard to explain except by what somebody above called "complete marketing wankery".

        • Well apple forces developers to update to current code standards whether you want to or not. Microsoft rarely forces code updates in their own divisions let alone across the OS.

          Hence why 10 years of windows 10 you still have to go to the control panel to access the printer que to remove botched print jobs.

          I did notice that finally got updated so it might only be 8-9 years

        • Re:Complete rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @07:31AM (#61254584) Journal

          Yeah, the code base is different for Mac vs PC, as OneDrive was launched on Mac in 2012 where it had been in various incarnations on Windows for years going back to "Live folders" or whatever the hell they called their thrashing-about strategies in the mid-2000s. It actually launched on iOS before Mac, so it's probably written in Objective-C, and thus was easily portable to 64-bit due to Apple's work to make sure the ObjC compilers made the transition easy. They probably didn't even mean to make it 64-bit, it just happened that way after upgrading their software tools, and the new versions default to a 64-bit target.

          Also, I doubt this was laziness or difficulty. It's more likely that the product manager backlogged it indefinitely because a 32-bit file sync tool is indistinguishable from a 64-bit file sync tool to users, unless the user is specifically looking for something to complain about.

          I mean, unless you are syncing over 4 billion files to OneDrive, and the developer isn't smart enough to chunk the list and MUST hold the whole thing in RAM; or you need to compute the percentage complete to 52 bits of precision...

      • Re:Complete rubbish (Score:5, Informative)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @07:01AM (#61254542)

        I ran NetBSD on a 64 bit Alpha box long before PCs made the migration. The amount of warnings and errors on 32 bit code was astounding. Nearly everything outside of the ports tree had issues.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          That was an issue with old, crappy code, suggesting that OneDrive is old, crappy code.

          For example, linking to static libraries. Or relying on assumed sizes of built-in types like int and float. Alignment can be an issue too, or packing for structs. But again, only if the code is crappy to start with.

          One recent project I worked on used the exact same C code for 8 bit AVR, 32 bit ARM and 64 bit Linux AMD64. Only thing I had to do to port away from 8 bit was add a few attributes for some packed data structures

      • The moment you have any sort of 3rd-party plugin architecture (against executable binaries, not a VM like Java or C#) you enter into a compatibility trap. Old plugins cannot be compatible with the new code if you change architectures. I don't really know anything about OneDrive, but this could easily be a problem. You must break something to go from 32 to 64 bits. (Now, whether it is something of value, that's a question for each product).

      • I think they just didn't bother to do 'a' because there won't be much benefit for something like OneDrive, as '!b'.

    • Maybe they have a 2^32 limit on number of files synchronized.

      j/k - the data structure must be abysmally worse than that.

    • Re:Complete rubbish (Score:4, Insightful)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @06:56AM (#61254524)
      not to mention the biggest bottleneck of transferring large files in OneDrive is your internet bandwidth bi-directionally. IF your upload speed is shit, it wont matter if its 256bit, 128bit, 64bit, or 16 bit. Im sure there are still a lot of people with low upload speeds in the 5-10Mbps range.

      • Re:Complete rubbish (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:53AM (#61255440) Homepage Journal

        Yes. The very reason I dumped Centurylink with their crappy asymmetric link and replaced it with Bluespan who offer symmetric 500M over a fixed wireless access link. With the pathetic uplink speeds of Century link, ack congestion on the uplink would kill speeds in both directions. TCP wasn't designed for asymmetric links.

         

    • But now OneDrive can compute the inaccurate time remaining to 53 bits of precision by using a 64-bit double-float!

      We really needed this!

    • I mean, you're right that it doesn't matter for OneDrive. There probably isn't much benefit, if there's any at all.

      Which is almost certainly why MS didn't bother to release a 64 bit version until they got sick of people asking for it.

    • (OneDrive doesn't need 4Gb RAM).

      I'll bet it does use more than 512MB. Especially this new version.

    • Given the amount of time that my PC spends with OneDrive taking up 100%CPU on one core, and File Explorer taking up 100% on a second core, OneDrive is CPU limited. And a gigantic CPU hog - especially when compared to SyncThing, which I also run. SyncThing sits quietly in the background, OneDrive causes my laptop fan to go nuts every time I save a file.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rhipf ( 525263 )

      So OneDrive doesn't use any registers? Just going from 32bit to 64bit registers can provide speed improvements.
      Does the OneDrive program use integers? If it does going to 64bit could also help.

      There is more to 64bit architecture than just increasing the available ram per program.

    • Yeah but Windows64 is a different OS than Windows32 and the performance of 32bit apps is worse than 64 bit ones because of changes made to Windows that the 32bit subsystem doesn't have access to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • A few kilobytes less than 4GB of RAM is available to 32-bit processes running on 64-bit Windows. The process only needs to run in 64-bit flat address space if it needs to access *more* than 4 GB of RAM. The 32-bit version can access pretty damn close to 4 GB of RAM already.

      The primary difference is that the 32-bit process will no longer need the added overhead of thunking between the 32-bit and 64-bit memory model.

  • Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @05:12AM (#61254328)

    Who the heck was waiting for this?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 )

      Nobody.

      The main reason for OneDrives existence is to try and force you to create a MIcrosoft account.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 )
        and to get you to pay monthly for hard drive storage thats in " the cloud ". I am not so sure " the cloud " is all the magical fairy tale shit its made out to be. It did not work out so well for Jennifer Lawrence keeping her photos in "the cloud", among many many other celebrities.

  • Haha ok lovely, want to play russian roulette with your data? Look no further. OneDrive is dysfunctional to begin with, so I can't even imagine how bad this 64-bit version will be.

  • When will they fix broken File Explorer ?!

    It cannot handle long filenames THAT IT CREATES ITSELF, FFS!

    Simpley pathetic.

  • 64-bit systems can access more resources than their 32-bit counterparts.

    a) Not true!
    b) 64-bit systems always USE more resources than their 32-bit counterparts - your PC will have less available resources after you "upgrade".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      a) quite true actually. Loads and stores are faster because the 64bit mode of the CPU allows you to pull data in larger chunks, therefore being more efficient, and using less of your battery resource (as an example).

      b) not true. 32bit uses more resources in your CPU because it's a legacy mode in most modern CPUs now, and 64bit is the faster, more efficient mode. So by design, it will now use LESS resources than the legacy 32bit counterpart. Also 64bit mode is more efficient at data handling - see cpu design

      • I suspect you are right, 64-bit programs are more efficient, but has anyone actually done a test to quantify the gain ?
        i.e. Run a benchmark of 32 and 64 bit programs on a modern PC and compared the power used to deliver the same performance ?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Actually I did a mini-test a few days ago, on 64-bit Linux, I wanted to know if there was a small advantage in using int (32-bit) rather than long int (64-bit**). I thought that maybe even on 64-bit, 32-bit ints might be faster becasue the intermediate results for e.g. multiply would fit in 64 rather than 128 bits. Not true. Using all 64-bit ints was about 5% faster.

          So always use 64-bit ints unless you've got such huge amounts of data that the space saving matters.

          ** long int on Windows is only 32-bit by de

        • I suspect you'll find the opposite, ie. 32-bit programs will be more efficient when it comes to memory accesses - they need less data fed to them. 64 bits will only win if there's a lot of 64bit integer math in the program or it's dependent on CPU extensions which aren't available on 32-bit CPUs (unlikely for OneDrive).

          AFAIK there's no overhead for switching between 32 bit and 64 bit instruction sets on x86 CPUs but you have to be careful with things like the stack pointer, ie. OS calls won't be slower if W

          • "32-bit programs will be more efficient when it comes to memory accesses - they need less data fed to them."

            I assume modern compilers will fetch 8 bytes at once in a 64-bit program, but need two goes to fetch 8 bytes in a 32-bit program ?

            And that does not address the power consumption issue.

        • Re:Going backwards, as usual (Score:4, Informative)

          by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:14AM (#61254934)
          I'm kinda doing one now. The big advantage to x64 is memory use, right? Well, I'm syncing a full windows image (4.9GB) to it right now, and the client's total memory use is around 111MB + 433MB virtualized. Hardly the sort of use that will see much benefit from going to 64 bits. So far as CPU use is concerned, I'm only seeing around 0.2% use on my 8 cores (surface book 2), so even if it was twice as fast the difference would be trivial. And no matter what efficiency gains there are in terms of CPU cycles, the real bottlenecks are I/O and network speeds, and they don't care if the process is 32 or 64 bit.

          • Your research does not appear to answer the point, i.e. "compared the power used to deliver the same performance"

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        a) In context, it's not particularly applicable. A file sync service won't realistically be able to take advantage of that many gb of ram. The differences in memory/register performance is nothing compared to the network and disk latency involved in the specific task.
        b) Mixed truth. What you say is true, but any size_t type info inflates memory usage. More and wider registers and such help on the compute side. The mix of this at least drove technical effort to make a 32-bit x86_64 (where the better architec

      • Loads and stores are faster because the 64bit mode of the CPU allows you to pull data in larger chunks, therefore being more efficient

        Not true.

        The memory controller will be pulling the data into the CPU cache in the exact same width no matter whether the program is 32 or 64 bits.

        OTOH a 64-bit program will need more data to be pulled in, ie. it will be less efficient.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        64bit apps need more memory resources due to more padding to properly align larger chunks. I want to say that I've read something in the ballpark of a 10% difference. Which in theory can affect cache hit rates. But overall 64bit tends to be faster out of the box for your reasons stated. The difference in memory usage is moot for all but micro-optimized single use systems. For the most part, 64bit is "faster" in nearly all practical cases. And who cares about 10% memory overhead these days. Cellphones with 8

      • It's a file sync tool. The CPU isn't even remotely the bottleneck - either the network or storage will be.

        Even if you had your OneDrive app syncing on a 10-gig upload, you still wouldn't be above 20% CPU utilization because the CPU would be waiting for a storage device somewhere to either read the data, or write the data and confirm it was written.

        This was made 64-bit basically because the last thing that required it to be 32-bit was upgraded underneath, so they just changed the target on the compiler and

    • 64-bit systems can access more resources than their 32-bit counterparts.

      a) Not true!

      It is kind of true on Windows, where 32 bit programs can only access 4GB RAM without shared memory.

      b) 64-bit systems always USE more resources than their 32-bit counterparts - your PC will have less available resources after you "upgrade".

      Sure, they tend to use slightly more memory. But they are also about 15% faster even without manual optimizations.

  • Um, we kind of have a 64 bit program done, sort of. We're only one of the largest, richest software companies, that actually only has 3 programmers left. But try the Dropbox rip off anyway, if feel you need too. It's not our fault that no one was left with an once of insight and creativity. Only beancounters left. I hope my bottle is still in the 2nd drawer.
    • On the other hand, why bother? OneDrive doesn't use that much memory or really do anything that would benefit from going to a 64 bit build, so why go through the trouble of maintaining two versions?

      A question whose answer seems to be, "because users kept bugging us for it anyway."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        For the same reason as Apple..
        This one program might not use much resources, but on an otherwise 64bit system the first time you load a 32bit app you also need to load all the duplicated system libraries.

  • I don't really care if it is 32 or 64 bit. I care about speed though.

    Now when I have to share a folder i have to click on the share button, but instead than giving me a link right away it shows me a slow small form (which i believe it's a webview to make things even slower), and as default it sets the link as read/write, but 99.999% of the times i want to share it read-only, so i have to change it, then click on the button to generate a link (which also takes time) and then finally i can copy it and send it

    • Could the issue be something else on your computer? My laptop is getting a little long in the tooth and has a ton of corporate security agents to make it even slower, but OneDrive remains quick and responsive.

  • Good enough (Score:4, Insightful)

    by linebackn ( 131821 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:27AM (#61254986)

    Yea, yawn, so this is one of those instances where a 32-bit version would have worked well enough, so it was probably less headache to support one single binary version.

    Faster? I don't doubt if you measured it down to the microsecond you might find a speed increase, but in this kind of application it is not likely something that would be perceptible to end users. That is the beauty of marketing, you can take some irrelevant statement that has even a hair of truth and pump the hell out of it. It's got what plants crave.

    Of course, putting your data on one of Microsoft's random servers, oh, I mean teh cloud, is not something most people should be doing, and the way they shove applications like this in everyone's face is sickening.

    • Using teh cloud for backup ... or even the whole enchilada ... requires some form of mental incapacity. It's not your data unless it's on hardware that you control. Ask the people who "lost their whole lives" in the recent Facebook hack. Did they store their original and only copies there?

      I've never seen a control for it, but I could swear that at least at work Onedrive has some kind of retention schedule after which things are completely deleted. No just moved from local storage to the cloud, but disappear

  • Software engineering (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @12:20PM (#61255814) Homepage Journal

    Is it software engineering to change a compiler flag? Even 32-bit assembler is not hard to adapt to 64-bit, not that an application like OneDrive should be using assembler directly. And hopefully crypto libraries that it probably uses were already available as 64-bit for ... 14 years.

  • 1) 32-bit works as well as 64-bit in Windows. WOW takes care of whatever's needed behind the scenes.
    2) 64-bit Onedrive is needed for marketing as part of O365.
    3) 64-bit might be very marginally more stable, if they code it right this time.
    4) Was this why Onedrive on my one 32-bit Windows system (2GB RAM, 32GB C: drive, Atom-based tablet) was stuck trying to update 3K items for several weeks recently? Worked fine in the 64-bit systems. Yes, I did delete a folder with a bunch of items, because it was no longe

  • So the real news here is that some shithead at Microsoft finally figured out how to add the -m64 flag to the compile command.

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