If end users are defined as home users and office users, then 64 bits
will never matter to them, just like 32 bits doesn't matter to them
today. For the majority of people, its just a yard stick, like 4
cylinder vs. 6 cylinder vs. 8. Most have some notion of what it means,
that more is generally "better," but they don't often base their buying
decision on that one metric.
They'll buy the computer that's available today that the salesman and
the demo software or the review online or in the magazine says that they
can do the work that they want to do on it. They don't particularly need
to know or care that the CPU has a 64 bit address space. As long as it
mostly works and does what they want to do in a "reasonable" amount of
time, they are happy.
End users are buying 64-bit machines today, they're getting them with
64-bit or 32-bit operating systems, and for the most part, it doesn't
really matter to them. Very few of them would notice the difference in
performance in the work that they are doing.
Sixty-four bitness will never matter to end users, but it will become
ubiquitous over time, and sooner or later nearly everyone will have
computers and devices with 64 bit CPUs and operating systems and the
vast majority of people won't really notice.
Yes, there are uses for 64 bit address space, just as a 128 bit address
space would enable use to tackle unthinkable problems. Yes, the
performance issues are there, but if it really matter to John and Jane
Computeruser, 64 bit computers would have become common place in the
market before now and DEC would have bought Compaq.
As a friend of mine said in 1992, "I wish they'd stop wasting time with
semiconductors and get on to doing computations with light."
Cheers,
Jason
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