Author: Eugene Nalimov
Date: 12:02:04 07/08/99
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On July 08, 1999 at 10:48:26, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On July 08, 1999 at 07:41:27, David Blackman wrote: > >>On July 07, 1999 at 13:01:42, Bruce Moreland wrote: >> >>> >>>On July 07, 1999 at 08:02:14, Rajen Gupta wrote: >>> >>>>when microsoft the great releases a 64 bit version of win9x/NT, would that be >>>>the time when the alpha processor comes into its own? >>> >>>I don't see why, but, warning, I am not an expert on the Alpha. >>> >>>The compiler you get from Microsoft, which I am told has a Digital back end, >>>generates 32-bit ints by default. But the Alpha seems to do fine on 32-bit >>>ints. And you can make a 64-bit int easily enough. >>> >>>So, I don't see what changing the OS and compiler to use 64-bit ints by default >>>will accomplish, in a chess programming sense. >>> >>>bruce >> >>Not really in a chess sprogramming sense, but a 64 bit address space would be >>nice for a lot of applications. I work at a small-to-medium size business and >>some of our stuff thrashes our 384MB server. An upgrade to almost 1GB is planned >>for soon. In a few years i expect us to need more than 4GB. Alpha/Linux would be >>a serious option if we wanted this right now. I suppose places with more Windows >>NT expertise would prefer NT, if and when it goes 64 bit. >> >>For chess, is suppose there might be some advantage in really huge transposition >>tables, or having the 5 piece EGTBs in ram instead of disc :-) > > >Xeon processors already support a 36 gigabyte address space for memory. That >will be impossible to 'fill' for several years... as the best machines have 16 >DIMM slots in them. and we don't have 1 gig DIMMS yet... Yes, but those 36Gb is not the normal flat address space. You have to write the application in a special way to use it (as you should in the old DOS days to use EMS). Otherwise, you are still limited by 4Gb address space. I doubt there will be a lot of such applications - maybe some DBMS, if any. OS will be able to utilize that memory, of course - either for a lot of concurrent processes (each uses 4Gb max), or for a file caching. BTW, what is the maximum file size on Linux/Alpha? Eugene
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