Re: 500.000 AMD64's shipped...

From: Brian Chase (bdc_at_world.std.com)
Date: 01/15/04 

Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 07:07:41 +0000 (UTC)

In article <$blvA10Xq9lE@eisner.encompasserve.org>,
Bob Koehler <koehler@eisner.aspm.encompasserve.org> wrote:
> In article <4005A927.7986EBF5@yahoo.com>, Tim MacEachern
> <Tim.MacEachern@ns.sympatico.ca> writes:

> > Nonsense, as said by a previous poster, who in the mainstream market is
> > going to want more than 40 physical address bits.
>
> The same guy who wanted more than 512KB RAM in his PC 18 years ago.

At current market prices, 1TB (40-bits) of cheap PC RAM will run about
$400,000 US. Assuming Moore's Law holds the course, it'll be sometime
around the years 2015-2017 before power users would find that amount of
memory reasonably affordable.

I think AMD have adequately sized their current implementation of x86-64.
There's nothing in the architecture which would present them from adding
more physical and virtual address bits, up to 64, as they need them.
Putting them in now would just be... well a significant waste of effort
and resources with no practical benefit from their target markets.

The notion of Itanium being somehow /better/ because it currently has
50-bit physical addressing is nothing but a meaningless sales gimmick.
It's going to be quite a while before anyone can afford 1024TB of high-end
server ECC RAM. What 50-bits means to me is that current Itanium
processor offerings are probably a good bit more expensive than they need
to be.

-brian. 

-- 
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
                   Do not fold, mutilate, or spindle.

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