Re: i5/OS 32 or 64-bit ?

["Lukas Beeler" <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Thanks, Lukas.  That makes a lot of sense.  I remember the evil days of
> "thunking" when Windows was struggling to move from 16-bit to 32-bit;

Oh, you'll need that knowledge again, as it is currently struggling to
move from 32bit to 64bit. Try looking at the "solutions" that are
required to get an Acrobat IFilter running on x64 machine with an x64
Sharepoint installation.

Another reason, mostly for the JVM point you mentioned is performance.
The pointer sizes for 32bit apps are 32bit, obviously. And double that
for 64 bit apps. The problem here is not size in memory, but memory
bandwidth.

I'm not big on details of the POWER architecture, but it looks like
POWER6 moved to NUMA instead of unified memory like it was in the
POWER5+ systems. AMD is already at NUMA, and Intel is moving there
with the new Nehalem architecture. So it looks like the memory
bandwidth issue is slowly being fixed.