64 Bits are Overrated

"I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that. Predominantly... you need it for memory addressability beyond 4GB. That's it. You don't really need it for performance, and the kinds of applications that 64-bit get used in mostly are large, server-class applications." -- Anand Chandrasekher

most desktop apps never use more than 1 gigabyte of memory (mostly due to the von-neumann bottleneck). And 32bit still allows using more than 4 gigs of memory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

So basically 64 bits just waste transistors.

>>49
Am I missing something here? 32 bit Linux reserves half of the virtual address space for the kernel, and 32 bit Windows reserves a quarter. PAE or not, why would they need to swap those kernel pages when switching processes?