Reply to Andrei,
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.
found a ref:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1168664
the CPU limit has to be >=128GB (look at Server 2003) or it might be 64GB
(re linux)
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.)
Most people will not have problems with 2GB/process limits, those that do
can go 64bit. Most people won't have much use for more than about 8-16GB
total of RAM and those are well within the CPU's limit (but outside the OS's
[vista/XP]).
My point is that few people are pushing either the per process or system
total memory limits of the x86-32bit CPUs and need something that only 64bit
CPU's will give them. (OTOH you might need 64bit to run the OS you need to
get at enough RAM)
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.
Agree. Compilers seem to need to be written for the corner cases. "No one
will ever need to do that" is never a valid answer.
Andrei
