So after deciding I was going to wait until the 64-bit Pi OS was tested and ready for use, I changed my mind and downloaded the beta and installed it.

It ran ok, though as with any Beta there are bound to be little glitches. There’s a survey where they are interested in what the PI is being used for and it showed UNDEFINED for my Pi’s serial number, though

cat /proc/cpuinfo

worked fine and displayed it.

The display utility let me change my display to 75 HZ at 1920 x 1080 and then promptly crashed. After reboot though it was at 75 HZ.

My main reason for trying it out though, I was curious about development tools, particularly IDES. I had forgotten that code.headmelted.com, the alternative source for Visual Studio Code (my favourite) supported arm64 which is what the 64-bit runs.  I was able to install VS Code from there without any problems.

64-bit vs 32-bit

32-bit has the memory limitation of 3 GB (in both Windows and Linux)  whereas 64-bit offers any amount of RAM up to what’s available. It’s not that big  thing with a 4 GB PI but with 8 GB it can make a big difference.  This article (Sorry that the link is to an article on Medium.com which offers a few free articles then paid) suggests that 64-bit Debian (which Raspberry Pi OS is) is quite a bit faster than 32-bit.  My impression is that it feels a bit snappier but that could be wishful thinking n my part!

I’ll put Asteroids on and see what fps I can get though that may not be a great way to compare them as the GPU plays a big part and I can’t see it making any difference, but I could be completely wrong on that. More as I investigate further.