32bit vs 64bit Operating Systems

Its 2010 and I browse the net. Yes I can do that. I see people 'with liberal arts majors' that 'are using computers for too long' and people that use 'top of the line' benchmark tools, all that agree as such:
"64bit will provide you with the ability to access more memory, but the speed of your systems will be the same!".

Maybe I went to the wrong engineering school. I was taught that 64bit cpu, will fetch in one cpu cycle, twice the data than a 32bit cpu. The motherboards I designed with the first 64bit cpu (ok boards) were doing exactly that. Also the reason that I (only once) liked morotola -68000- was that the data bus and the address bus were fetching individually at their cycles without the need of a latch switch. I programmed longwords and quadrowords on vaxes (now they probably have xecto or octowords :-) ) knowing data bus limitations and sometimes counting on the 'executor' to parse during unexpected shutdowns or even power-offs. We were counting ticks (1/32 of a second) for the program's response (scada apps)

Now the internet is buzzing that there is no difference in speed using 32 or 64 bit operating system. Something is rotten in the kingdom of 'Denmark'.

I read on /. an article that there are no hard core technicians and programmers any more. everybody learned ONE high? level language and everybody is accessing systems so far away from the core shell that have actually lost reality. I've seen that with some of my colleagues/ trainees that never snapped out. That is major problem in computing, if you dont mind me saying so, Computer Science is totally irrelevant with Computer Engineering and it reminds me of a stock market short selling technique. Its gonna blow, big, and it'll be tooooo late.

At least we got an explanation for the existence of bloatware. The rest we blame on unoptimized linkers?

I have a problem with bad designed s/w, and the market does not punish the maker/ publisher/ marketeer.