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If I Had a Hammer
adpowers writes: "Anandtech is running an article about their preview of AMD's Hammer. They had one machine running 32-bit Windows and the other running 64-bit Linux. The Linux machine had a 32 bit program and an identical program that was compiled for 64-bit processor support. Both processors were less than 30 days old and running without any crashes, but they weren't at full speed." We did one Hammer story a day or two ago, but there have been several more posted since then (wild guess: the NDA expired). Tom's Hardware has a story, so does Gamespot.
... I'm sure this will definately 'hammer' down Intel..
boom boom.
RIP Spike Milligan
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
No, 64-bits is not enough. There were optical storage arrays built nearly 10 years ago that used the full 64-bit address space (yes, it was largely done to prove you could, but there are systems being built now to use the entire 64-bit address space).
One thing to note is that when you have 64-bit addressing, you only get 2^63 worth of storage. Why? Because it's a signed int so you can express a negative offset from current location.
Sure, you can munge it so that your physical storage space isn't represented by a single pointer (most 32-bit OS's do that now, since otherwise you'd be limited to a 2G partition and files), but it's a lot easier on everyone if you just handle it with a large enough pointer.
I'll admit, I'm having a hard time coming up with a real use for a 128-bit integer operation (crypto maybe; perhaps neural networks). Engineering and FP ops are different - they use different registers and the FPU, so talking about more precision isn't relevant here. Of course, I suspect people had a difficult time thinking of a use for 64-bit operations back when we were using 8 or 16 bit general purpose CPUs.