Sure, Opteron can do arithmetic with 64 bit integers (as can the Pentium 4 using SSE2 instructions).
What makes a processor 64-bit is whether it can deal with 64-bit addresses. The Opteron's TLB supports only a 48-bit virtual address space and a 40-bit physical address space. Read the fine print here.
Competing 64-bit processors such as the Itanium 2 support a full 64-bit virtual address space. It would be very difficult for the x86-64 platform to use 64-bit virtual addresses because of the heirarchical page table structure which it uses (based on the ia-32 page table structure which was designed for a 32-bit virtual address space).
*sigh* unfortunately this water-walking technology only works for an insect-sized robot, right? How cool would it be if the surface tension of water was that strong for human-sized creatures!
I've always been confused why people claim to write in "English", but then refuse to write with the same spelling as English people. Explicitly using a qualifier (as in "American English") is more helpful, but the qualified expression still seems somewhat contradictory since an American is not an Englishman. And what qualifier does one use to describe the English used in England? "English English"? Oh no, that sounds silly, so we must broaden our qualifier to cover the whole British Isles (in all their variety of language!): "British English". Hmm.
Perhaps we need to replace the broader use of the word "English" with a new word which is not tied to a specific country?
Turbine's previous game, Asheron's Call 2, uses DirectX and not OpenGL (see system requirements). If this new game uses DirectX exclusively once more, then we won't see a linux (or mac) port of this game. Transgaming's WineX will be our only hope to play it on Linux.
By moving to a 64-bit computer, the address space becomes astronomical - it is 4 billion time larger than the 32-bit addressing space.
Yes, a 64-bit address space does seem astronomical - until you try to be able to address any data on the internet. Let me do some arithmetic...
There are almost 2^32 possible IPv4 addresses. We are told that these will be exhausted soon. Suppose that 1/8th of them actually correspond to a host on the internet: that's 2^29 hosts. Now how much data might be on each host? We only have 35 bits of virtual address left, which allows an average of 32Gb of addressable data per host. This seems very limited.
So 64 bit addresses may not be sufficient to address all of the information in the internet. Most P2P systems internally use a 128-bit address space of file hashes. So is it useful for CPU instructions to be able to address this much data using virtual addresses?
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Sure, Opteron can do arithmetic with 64 bit integers (as can the Pentium 4 using SSE2 instructions). What makes a processor 64-bit is whether it can deal with 64-bit addresses. The Opteron's TLB supports only a 48-bit virtual address space and a 40-bit physical address space. Read the fine print here. Competing 64-bit processors such as the Itanium 2 support a full 64-bit virtual address space. It would be very difficult for the x86-64 platform to use 64-bit virtual addresses because of the heirarchical page table structure which it uses (based on the ia-32 page table structure which was designed for a 32-bit virtual address space).
*sigh* unfortunately this water-walking technology only works for an insect-sized robot, right? How cool would it be if the surface tension of water was that strong for human-sized creatures!
I've always been confused why people claim to write in "English", but then refuse to write with the same spelling as English people. Explicitly using a qualifier (as in "American English") is more helpful, but the qualified expression still seems somewhat contradictory since an American is not an Englishman. And what qualifier does one use to describe the English used in England? "English English"? Oh no, that sounds silly, so we must broaden our qualifier to cover the whole British Isles (in all their variety of language!): "British English". Hmm.
Perhaps we need to replace the broader use of the word "English" with a new word which is not tied to a specific country?
Turbine's previous game, Asheron's Call 2, uses DirectX and not OpenGL (see system requirements). If this new game uses DirectX exclusively once more, then we won't see a linux (or mac) port of this game. Transgaming's WineX will be our only hope to play it on Linux.
There are almost 2^32 possible IPv4 addresses. We are told that these will be exhausted soon. Suppose that 1/8th of them actually correspond to a host on the internet: that's 2^29 hosts. Now how much data might be on each host? We only have 35 bits of virtual address left, which allows an average of 32Gb of addressable data per host. This seems very limited.
So 64 bit addresses may not be sufficient to address all of the information in the internet. Most P2P systems internally use a 128-bit address space of file hashes. So is it useful for CPU instructions to be able to address this much data using virtual addresses?I have used Linux running on top of the L4 microkernel, and it is not crippled.
Check out the web page of the L4/Linux project:
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/LinuxOnL4/