Re: Will Prescott work on Win64?

glen herrmannsfeldt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>Linus Torvalds wrote:

>> glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>> 
>>>It was discussed in some newsgroup, maybe this one, that only a very
>>>small fraction of code needs 64 bits.  You only need 64 bit addressing
>>>for really large programs (there is always PAE if you need it).
>> 
>> 
>> That really doesn't matter.
>> 
>> It's not a question of "most people don't need it".
>> 
>> It's a question of having advantages of a mass market. If AMD continues to
>> produce 32-bit versions of the Athlon chip (regardless of whether they base
>> it on the old K7 architecture or just a cut-down K8) they automatically
>> kill off interest in their 64-bit architecture.

>Yes, and convincing people that they need something that they really 
>don't.   Those people reading mail, or word processing, but like the 
>idea of having a 64 bit processor so they can read mail faster, or 
>process words faster.

>What would we do without marketing departments.


You can believe its marketing if you want, but there are already people
running into limits (which are more like 2GB than 4GB for the way most
OSes work)  And with RAM cheap enough that it isn't unusual for normal
people to buy a system with 1GB these days, we need only wait until next
year for the 1Gbit DRAMs to become the mass market and we've hit 2GB
(since the mass market CPUs are all dual channel you sell them with two
DIMMs)  You want to build any useful expansion capability, and you better
have a 64 bit CPU.

The thing that'll make AMD64 successful in the mass market but will
keep Itanium always on the high end, looking at the mass market longingly
but never coming in is that in three years when pretty much every PC sold
will have 2GB or more and need a 64 bit OS for efficient operation AMD
will have an installed base of 100 million+.  Itanium will have maybe a
million, with 95% of those in computational clusters and datacenters.

Intel knows this, so they'll do 64 bit x86, and their silly claims that
64 bits isn't needed for another five years will suddenly be forgotten,
just like how they conveniently ignore clock rate where Pentium M is
concerned.  They just delay it for now, probably partly because Microsoft's
pressure forced to them to be compatible (in some form) with AMD64, and
partly because of internal politics with the pro-Itanium crowd holding
onto their vain hope Itanium can replace x86.

-- 
Douglas Siebert                          [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink.  When they wake up in the morning,
 that's as good as they're going to feel all day" -- Frank Sinatra