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Are We Not Ready For 64-Bit?
Q3vi1 writes "The Inquirer posted an intriguing article about how Intel doesn't think that we'll be ready for mainstream 64-bit computing until 2007. Coupled with the fact that MS isn't supporting the Opteron yet for their Windows 2003 Server, we may see a delay in consumer applications for 64-bit computing. However, as this article states, some people don't really care and will just go for Linux and AMD as a nice marriage."
As I have been MS free since 2000, I really couldn't care less what they do or don't do. As for Intel, here's some news for them, they DO NOT have a monopoly like their special friend. I'll gladly purchase an AMD Opteron to run my shiny new Linux 2.6 kernel sometime this fall while the WinTel boys play their reindeer games. In fact, dare I say it, I'm GLAD this is happening. Hopefully, this will finally show Intel that their future is not tied to MS as it was in the past.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Do I need 64 bits? No.
Do I want competition to the Xeon in 4 way systems? (price and spec them, it is insane! 1.6 Ghz and 1200 a pop). Hell^yeah.
Opteron is not about 64 bits, it is just a nice addition. Opteron is about competition in the low end server/high end desktop market (which is intel dominated btw). The reaosn intel is naysaying 64 bits is because they have no competing thec in this area other than the Xeon which has terrible price/performance numbers.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
If they're cheap enough, 64bit will help gaming in a big way. The counter-strike team reported a ~30% increase in performance just by recompiling. Granted CS doesn't need a cray to run, but Battlefield 1942 has had some 64 player servers which I believe needed dual Athlons. 64 people is fun, but how bout 128?
Not only that, but with an (relatively)inexpensive 64bit chip out there I could see more servers popping up to play on. More servers hosting large games would be great! Feed my addiction please.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Your view of 'when are we ready for 64-bits' largely depends A) on how much money you are willing to spend on RAM and B) how soon your OS supports more than 4 GB of RAM on potential 64-bit hardware (PAE hacks notwithstanding).
If you're willing to spend $200 for RAM in your system, then when 4 GB of RAM is cheaper than $200, you'll basically be wanting a 64-bit system (PAE hacks notwithstanding).
With pricewatch.com showing 1 GB of PC133 SDRAM going for as little as $120, I'd guess that another 4x drop in RAM prices would lead to substantial consumer demand for 64-bit hardware.** And that doesn't even include the demand for 4+GB RAM now in database applications. Whatever the case, this would seem to be earlier than 2007. Unless Microsoft doesn't get its act together (they were pretty late with 32-bit 386 support, IIRC)... which wouldn't be such a bad thing, for Linux at least. But I wouldn't count on that.
--LP
** Yes yes, technically you probably need to spend a bit more to get higher density RAM so that you can fill or exceed 4 GB given the limited number of memory slots available in your system.
That's not exactly true. You're forgetting that the entire bus architecture would be 64 bit. There wouldn't be any slowdown since there's no basis for comparison. The upside is that really big (ie. > 4G) file operations and double integer ops should be much faster. Think video and databases for apps that would benefit greatly. I agree that for mom sending email and surfing the web, there's no real incentive to invest in this kind of hardware. However, for data mining, this is a big deal. It'll be interesting to see if a peripheral market develops around the 64 bit arch. Should prove interesting!
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The thing AMD needs to do is put 16 or 32 DIMM slots in the motherboard for their 64-bit processor. As many others have pointed out, RAM is dirt cheap for up to 1GB DIMMs. I could buy a 64-bit processor and motherboard plus 32GB of RAM for a reasonable sum.
That's 32 gigabytes. Just the disk caching speedups alone would be worthwhile. My firm belief is the only reason these huge RAM sizes aren't common is the 4GB physical / 3GB per process limits of current 32 bit OSs.
Garbage Collection
"Real Languages" use garbage collection (ha, just trolling).
Seriously, the ability to use an address space that is gignormous is really worth a lot for garbage collection algorithms. For example, you can allocate into reserved portions of the address space and then the type of an object can be determined by its location. You can also use copying collectors without a big hit. Reserving half your address space for copying sucks at 2GB, it doesn't matter much for 17179869184 GB.
Also the "single address space" operating system concept needs more research. However, to get that research going now would require low cost plentiful hardware.
The fact is, there are tons of useful reasons to have 64 bits, we just don't know what they are because we haven't had 64 bits on a commodity platform.
If you have 64 bit addresses and about 1GB of flash RAM, you can completely avoid all the trouble of traditional filesystems. Have your OS use the disk like one big area of RAM, buffer into the NV RAM, keep all the metadata in NV ram, and use a journaled approach for metadata. Speed and simplicity instead of B-trees and inodes and such.
There are all kinds of reasons for 64 bit.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
Convenient that Intel thinks widespread demand for 64-bit won't occur until 2007 since they don't have a 64-bit desktop processor and Itanium tanked. AMD knows better. Check out their Studio64 which has quotes from tech leaders, analysts, press, etc. on when 64-bit will hit big and what this means for you and me: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_8366_7823 ,00.html
Well, if we really want to pay attention to history, there is NOT a lot of room for RAM to grow. There is only a 4 - 16X growth capacity here. Just a few short years ago, 32M was a lot of memory, and was the typical amount sold on a new PC. I'd hate to see some funky expanded memory crap like we had back in the 640K barrier days. The days of 4G machines are NOT far off.
Note that most standard PC's can't handle the full 4G anyway due to video and other expansion cards snarfing larger and larger chunks of the address space.
We can learn a lot from the IDE folks about how to NOT anticipate the future as year after year we kept slamming into the limits of the spec-of-the-day causing all sorts of problems.
A larger problem than memory is PCI bus bandwidth. Before 64 bit processors can really shine, we need a better bus. Hell, the current generation of PCI can't even handle today's 32 bit processors well, especially in SMP boxen.