Real vs Float & 32bit vs 64bit CPU Performance Question

Hi

I am wrting a application that involves a lot of floating point number crunching.
My data is stored in tables of the form:

TABLE data (
date_id INT,
value FLOAT)

I have just noticed in the documention that the FLOAT data type is stored
in 8 bytes (ie 64 bits) as opposed to the REAL data type which uses 4 bytes
(ie 32 bits).

All things being equal, does this mean that if I change my data type to REAL
(and lose some precision) I will see a significant performance increase on
my 32 bit Pentium 4?

Or, if I keep my data type as FLOAT will I see a significant performance
increase by changing to a 64 bit CPU?

Regards

John Duffy

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