Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 16:03:14 07/08/99
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On July 08, 1999 at 15:02:04, Eugene Nalimov wrote: >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 The data structures are all "long". So it is possible that the size of a file is 2^64-1, but I don't have an alpha handy to try this on... Wouldn't surprise me if something broke however, as the 1-2-3 level indirect pointers would suspect to have glitches for block numbers that big... But it would definitely be fun to find out. :) Bob
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