On 2/17/07, Jason Stephenson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
That's not really true. 16-bit machines are *very* limited. There is not a whole lot you can do in 64 kilobytes of RAM (all you can directly address with a 16-bit address word). Anything running on an 8086 (i.e., MS-DOS and all its software) has to play all sorts of games just to address the full megabyte the IBM-PC architecture allows for in Real Mode. And that's really just a way to enable a more-than-16-bit-address-space without actually having to spend more money on hardware; but it shifts a disproportionate burden to software. If you've ever had to program in a windowed/segmented memory model, you'll know what I mean. It really, really sucks. The 32-bit flat memory model (as enabled on the IBM-PC platform by the i386) yields a lot of real benefits to people-doing-ordinary-tasks-like-reading-email-browsing-the-web-writing-letters-looking-at-pictures-and-calculating-their-taxes. They can do things like browse a multimedia web page, or manage their collection of family photos, or do real-time WYSIWYG page layout of the church newsletter, all while listening to their collection of pirated digital music. It's extremely difficult to do that in a single 64 KB memory space. On the other hand, I'm pressed to conceive of what practical benefit people-doing-ordinary-tasks-like-reading-email-browsing-the-web-writing-letters-looking-at-pictures-and-calculating-their-taxes will get from x86-64. Two gigabytes[1] is a *lot* of address space, even for Microsoft's bloated code. There's not much I can think of that benefits from more than that. Digital video editing is a good one. Virtual reality (which includes most games) is likely to be another. There doesn't seem to be much else of interest to people-doing-ordinary-tasks-like-reading-email-browsing-the-web-writing-letters-looking-at-pictures-and-calculating-their-taxes. Footnotes --------- [1] Two gigabytes is the correct figure in the context of Microsoft's bloated code. The NT kernel splits the 4 GB address space between 2 GB for userland programs and 2 GB for kernel purposes, so userland programs are effectively limited to 2 GB of address space.[2][3] This has been a real problem in some cases.[4] [2] There is a way to change it to a 3GB/1GB split, but that introduces a lot of other issues, and is generally only of use to people running a single memory-hungry program, not several smaller ones. [3] The Linux kernel uses a different design, and does not suffer from this problem. [4] Microsoft's server products, especially Exchange[5], are frequently hampered by this limit, when 2 GB is not enough, but 4294967296 GB is too much. [5] Exchange before 2007 was limited to 32-bit and did not support memory windowing. Exchange 2007 is 64-bit only. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
