IBM Itanium Based Systems and Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday December 6, 2000 @08:09AM from the shipping-when-they-feel-like-it dept.

ErrantKbd writes "An article at Infoworld discusses IBM's plans to release Itanium-based systems sometime in the January/February timespan. They will be building systems running Windows of course, but also ready-made servers running RedHat, Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE. Should be pretty sweet provided everything goes smoothly with the 64-bit processor. Note: there is an error in the article, a 64 bit system can directly address approximately 1 billion times more than the article suggests." Those'll be one helluva desktop box.

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Re:Address space less than 64-bits? by Anonymous Coward · 2000-12-06 03:59 · Score: 5

Itanium reportedly has 44 bits of physical addressing (16TB, just like the article said).

It also has 51 bits of virtual addressing (51 address bits + 3 region index bits). 50 bits of virtual addressing are guaranteed by IA64, implementations are free to implement more.

Most general-purpose 64-bit processors implement between 40 and 44 bits of physical address.

The only 64-bit processor that I know of with a full 64-bit MMU (ie, 64-bit virtual addresses) is UltraSPARC III.