[Info-vax] OpenVMS I64 V8.1 "Evaluation Release"?

[Fritz Wuehler]

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> Dennis Grevenstein <dennis.grevenstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> (snip, someone wrote)
> >>> I sometimes wonder what might have happened if AMD
> >>> had not come up with x86_64.
>  
> >> That's like speculating how history would have developped 
> >> in a parallel universe.
> 
> > Sure, but IA64 had a chance to take over serious x86 market share,
> > because the old x86 was only a 32bit platform.
> 
> Yes, but how many really need 64 bits? How many computers sold
> today have more than 4GB of RAM? 

Many desktop computers are being sold now with 8G of RAM and 4G has been
standard for awhile and is now considered the absolute low end of the high
performance desktop range. But the bigger question is the one you asked
first, how many really need 64 bits? Almost nobody, almost no application
that is. It has been unproductive on small and large machines and cost more
in software dollars than hardware. If accessing more than 4G of RAM was an
issue, surely that can be done without 64 bits.

If you do have huge RAM then you can write code to exploit it (in memory
data bases, etc) but mostly 64 bit is a huge waste of time and money. About
the only platform where 64 bit helped was Intel/AMD since x86 is so
register-starved from its circa 1974 design that just never matured. But
they could have given us a reasonable number of registers without adding 64
bit support, they simply chose not to. 64 bit seems to be 99% marketing and
1 percent actual use case.

> Much of high-end scientific computing has been made affordable
> by people buying processors that they didn't need, driving the
> economy of scale. 

It's marketing more than anything. You HAVE to have the latest and you HAVE
to be at the head of the pack if you are a public company.

> The small number of registers in IA32 was also a problem, and
> x86_64 does help there. That might have been fixed without going
> to 64 bits, though.

I didn't see this when I wrote what I wrote above. Exactly.

> For the real high-end servers that really need the large address
> space, IA64 might not have been so bad, but it seems to me that it
> took too long to get to market, partly because of the need for IA32
> compatibility. 

I haven't seen the advantages on z/OS. And that architecture already had
enough GPRs. IA64 was another unnecessary layer of bloat with weird RISC and
IA32 compatbility. The market decided they wanted the IA32 (x86)
compatibility but not yet another RISC processor (NYARP) and Itanium is only
alive because Intel has alot of money to burn.