On 11 Sep, 2013, at 5:31 pm, Vincent Habchi <vi...@macports.org> wrote:
> But what bother me most, is that I don’t really see the point. A smartphone > is a phone, it is neither a web server nor a huge database machine nor a > supercomputer. Who wants to mmap 5 GiB files on a phone? Which process needs > more than 2 GiB at most? Seriously? I see this as one step in a process. 64 bit architecture will trickle down from power chips to mobile chips just the way other changes have. There's sense in standardising on one architecture throughout the line, especially with the interoperability of large parts of OSX and iOS and who can say whether some grandchild of the chips we have in the mobile devices will end up powering the next range of multi-core mac pros or some other device. 64 bit is where it's going across the board, all chips will follow. Remembering the conversion to 64 bit in OSX, this doesn't happen overnight. Apps stay in the appstore and run on old hardware for years. I just read the transition guide and took a deep breath, never fun, it'll be quite a while before 64 bit apps are the norm and so it seems like a good plan to start biting the bullet now there's the first chip which supports it so that when 32 bit is ready to go away, most everything will be ready for the future. I'm not sure the examples of 4Gb mmap()ed files and huge processes on mobile devices are necessarily the best examples. There are speed advantages you can gain, a match between processor hardware and GPU hardware helps there too, if I can get 10% or more extra power out of one core, that delays the day I have to add another one. Anyway I see this as future proofing and a drive towards convergence of hardware and software to one architecture. I sure hope 64 bit lasts longer than some of the previous ones when we all get there, I really don't want to have to figure out what a long long long long long long long long int is before I hang up my keyboard. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
