BCS wrote:
Reply to Andrei,
In my opinion, it's not application pressure that drives 64-bit
machine adoption, now or in the near future. It's RAM price,
availability, and usefulness. A 32-bit machine cannot gainfully have
more than 4GB of RAM, period.
IIRC 32 bit Intel chips can address more like 64GB of RAM (I can't find
the ref but I seem to recall about 4 extra address bits). It's just
virtual address spaces that are limited to 4GB (or 2-3GB after the OS
takes it's pound of flesh)
As pointed out, only a few apps need anything near 2GB of RAM per process.
Even if only a few apps need anything near 2GB of RAM per process, their
sum will exceed that limit rather quickly, which gives strong
justification to 64-bit OSs. (Not sure if you meant to basically say the
same.)
The real problem is that there are applications that need as much memory
as they could possibly get, and for those dmd simply offers no option.
Andrei
