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#11
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:09:28 -0600, Evgenij Barsukov wrote:
My Opteron system is close to 2 year old, and it never ran a single line of 64 bit code. Back then when I built it, the reason behind it was a dual processor system for just over a half of equal Xeon rig price. Will it ever do 64? Only when there will be demand to do some work that can't possibly be done under 32 bit OS. So far, never heard of any requirement of 64 bit code in the section of software market in which I make a living. There are still very few softw. that support 64, not to mention _require_ it. I was surprized recently that Half Life II was released in 64 bit version. However I am not going to run and by win xp-64 just because of that. Support it? There is a ton (SuSE is all 64bit). Require, perhaps not. IMO when we went to GB real memory two or three GB virtual gets a little close. I've had my laptop shut down short of memory (2GB real). Now if you need to address 8 GB of memory for some purposes (DB server?), 64 bit is the only game in town. Real memory virtual memory. 32bit machiens can only address 4GB (2GB in most cases) virtual memory, no matter how much real memory they have. No, we're well in shootin'-range of 64b being necessary. -- Keith |
#12
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:10:29 GMT, Robert Redelmeier
wrote: EdG wrote in part: Well .... I didn't buy my two AMD64's for their 64-bit, it was basically icing on the cake, Sorta like the 386s? I consider the uptake of AMD64 to be nothing short of phenomenal in comparison. In a far more entrenched and less geeky market, we have day one OSes and a remarkable amount of support. Even from the known laggard, MS. IIRC the 386 had to wait 5 years for runnable OSes (IIRC, OS/2 v2 and non-beta Linux). Apps followed, and will this time too. There *were* the 386 DOS Extenders and Desqview386 which was a very solid multitasking environment, long before Windows 3.0 came along or was even worth looking at. With a coupla nudges here & there, things could have turned out very differently. In the corporate market, the IBM/M$ "promise" of OS/2 V1 had a serious effect in slowing down 32-bit Protected Mode uptake. I'm sure we still have the "notices" from our big clients warning us of the requirements for OS/2 V1 versions of our software to fit their scheduled transition; fortunately we ignored them... never happened. I'd attended the OS/2 V1 dog 'n' pony show in NYC and I was not impressed... though it did take some serious "discussions" with our guys "out in the trenches" to stay away from it. Besides, Phar Lap's DOS Extender was so simple and DesqView386 was no effort at all - it just worked. -- Rgds, George Macdonald |
#13
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 08:13:03 -0500, Yousuf Khan wrote:
George Macdonald wrote: I'm still not 100% sure about that. Its also been suggested that M$ was just somewhat less than competent. They also knew that AMD's supply was not going to carry the market so apply a bit of Parkinson's Law as well and a new-found(?) desire to provide "security" and that accounts for a fair part of it. As Tony has remarked, it *did* take them a while to get WinXP SP2 out the door. It's an ironic world we live in, when people find you more acceptable because you're incompetant. There were good reasons for it to delay introduction of SP2, as they were trying to fix a leaky boat. At that time security on Windows seemed like swiss cheese. However, they had x64 finished much earlier, even though they kept releasing release candidates. They were hoping for device drivers to be released, but nobody would release device drivers until Microsoft released the OS. They could've released x64 and still released SP2 for 32-bit. Whether they could have or not, is a matter which can only be known inside M$ - anything else is speculation. They publicly stated that SP2 had priority and x-64 would have to come after all the security stuff had been done and proved in SP2. Excuse or reason?shrug Really the most telling sign that they were delaying was the fact that Sun Microsystems started development work on their Solaris 10 x64 about two years after Microsoft, and still released it six months before Microsoft! One could say that Sun has years of experience with 64-bit operating systems, and Microsoft doesn't. But Microsoft already had 64-bit source code for Windows in their Itanium port, and other than low-level assembly language differences, most of it would be the same between the two architectures, just a recompile away. If Windows x64 had been released near to when AMD had released their hardware, even if AMD didn't sell as many chips as Intel, the fact that a released OS was sitting there it would've been gathering device driver support ready for the time when Intel came on board. By the time Intel was ready with 64-bit, you'd have a mature operating system already with lots of device driver support. And people coming in with Intel would have had much easier time. AMD users could've acted as the beta testers for Intel users. Debatable IMO - I have my suspicions, just as you do, but the "situation" does have *some* ring of truth to it. AMD still had no momentum and certainly not in servers at the time. Would the drivers have materialized for a platform with such a small market footprint?... hard to be certain from my POV. Even now there are many x64 drivers which are lacking, extremely buggy or for devices like printers which will never appear. -- Rgds, George Macdonald |
#14
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
"George Macdonald" wrote in message ... On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:10:29 GMT, Robert Redelmeier wrote: EdG wrote in part: Well .... I didn't buy my two AMD64's for their 64-bit, it was basically icing on the cake, Sorta like the 386s? I consider the uptake of AMD64 to be nothing short of phenomenal in comparison. In a far more entrenched and less geeky market, we have day one OSes and a remarkable amount of support. Even from the known laggard, MS. IIRC the 386 had to wait 5 years for runnable OSes (IIRC, OS/2 v2 and non-beta Linux). Apps followed, and will this time too. There *were* the 386 DOS Extenders and Desqview386 which was a very solid multitasking environment, long before Windows 3.0 came along or was even worth looking at. With a coupla nudges here & there, things could have turned out very differently. In the corporate market, the IBM/M$ "promise" of OS/2 V1 had a serious effect in slowing down 32-bit Protected Mode uptake. I'm sure we still have the "notices" from our big clients warning us of the requirements for OS/2 V1 versions of our software to fit their scheduled transition; fortunately we ignored them... never happened. I'd attended the OS/2 V1 dog 'n' pony show in NYC and I was not impressed... though it did take some serious "discussions" with our guys "out in the trenches" to stay away from it. Besides, Phar Lap's DOS Extender was so simple and DesqView386 was no effort at all - it just worked. -- Rgds, George Macdonald I'm sure you recall that OS/2 was supposed to do all that stuff while running on a 286 PC/AT. del |
#15
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On 1 Feb 2006 11:14:47 -0800, "YKhan" wrote:
Adorable little Ed Stroglio rant: Hatching Eggs . . . "Remember x86-64? The stick AMD was supposed to beat Intel to death with? Then Intel got themselves the same stick, and the would-be beaters found something else to talk about. Yes, AMD is doing better now, but not because of x86-64. Indeed, AMD's increased fortunes have come well after Intel switched. Microsoft came out with a Windows XP for x86-64, but the world hasn't exactly stampeded to get it." http://www.overclockers.com/tips00910/ I always thought the reason nobody flocked to XP x64 was because Microsoft delayed and delayed so much to let Intel catch up that people lost interest in it? I mean you know Microsoft was delaying here, even Solaris 10 came out for x64 before Windows did, despite starting work on it 2 years later. The reason most people I talk to are still running 32-bit WinXP on their 64-bit workstations is that the driver support *STILL* isn't there for a lot of their peripherals. Sure, the big name stuff like nVidia, Broadcom, etc. is fine. However when you start throwing some obscure hardware in the system you're often SOL. Of course, that's not to say that Microsoft is totally without blame here, other OSes seem to have had a much easier time in their transition to 64-bit drivers. For most it was just a recompile, or at worst a few patches here and there to make the code 64-bit safe. On Windows it seems like it's a rather more complicated process. ------------- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca |
#16
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 08:13:03 -0500, Yousuf Khan
wrote: George Macdonald wrote: I'm still not 100% sure about that. Its also been suggested that M$ was just somewhat less than competent. They also knew that AMD's supply was not going to carry the market so apply a bit of Parkinson's Law as well and a new-found(?) desire to provide "security" and that accounts for a fair part of it. As Tony has remarked, it *did* take them a while to get WinXP SP2 out the door. It's an ironic world we live in, when people find you more acceptable because you're incompetant. There were good reasons for it to delay introduction of SP2, as they were trying to fix a leaky boat. At that time security on Windows seemed like swiss cheese. However, they had x64 finished much earlier, even though they kept releasing release candidates. They were hoping for device drivers to be released, but nobody would release device drivers until Microsoft released the OS. They could've released x64 and still released SP2 for 32-bit. My outsider's view of it was that there was a big effort on-going at Microsoft to link up the code-bases from a security standpoint. As such they wanted to have roughly the same base code (as far as service packs go at least) for WinXP Home, XP Pro, XP x64 and Win2K3 Server. Since XP is BY FAR the biggest ticket item/biggest money maker of the lot, they needed to get that one solidified first. Everything else could be pushed back behind that. Again though, this is just the outsider's perspective. What was going on in the inside could very well have just been complete chaos! : ------------- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca |
#17
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On Fri, 3 Feb 2006 19:06:45 -0600, "Del Cecchi"
wrote: "George Macdonald" wrote in message ... On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:10:29 GMT, Robert Redelmeier wrote: EdG wrote in part: Well .... I didn't buy my two AMD64's for their 64-bit, it was basically icing on the cake, Sorta like the 386s? I consider the uptake of AMD64 to be nothing short of phenomenal in comparison. In a far more entrenched and less geeky market, we have day one OSes and a remarkable amount of support. Even from the known laggard, MS. IIRC the 386 had to wait 5 years for runnable OSes (IIRC, OS/2 v2 and non-beta Linux). Apps followed, and will this time too. There *were* the 386 DOS Extenders and Desqview386 which was a very solid multitasking environment, long before Windows 3.0 came along or was even worth looking at. With a coupla nudges here & there, things could have turned out very differently. In the corporate market, the IBM/M$ "promise" of OS/2 V1 had a serious effect in slowing down 32-bit Protected Mode uptake. I'm sure we still have the "notices" from our big clients warning us of the requirements for OS/2 V1 versions of our software to fit their scheduled transition; fortunately we ignored them... never happened. I'd attended the OS/2 V1 dog 'n' pony show in NYC and I was not impressed... though it did take some serious "discussions" with our guys "out in the trenches" to stay away from it. Besides, Phar Lap's DOS Extender was so simple and DesqView386 was no effort at all - it just worked. -- Rgds, George Macdonald I'm sure you recall that OS/2 was supposed to do all that stuff while running on a 286 PC/AT. Yeah well that was the big mistake. Back then even Intel took the stance that the 386 was only for those "who really needed it" - they thought the same with 486... and even had a slew of 386 support chips still in the pipeline when 486 came out. But "all that stuff" I mentioned included the 32-bit flat memory model - that was the killer for doing real computing on a desktop. A lot of mainframe code got converted to Phar Lap's DOS Extender. -- Rgds, George Macdonald |
#18
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On Fri, 3 Feb 2006 19:06:45 -0600, "Del Cecchi"
wrote: "George Macdonald" wrote in message ... snip I'd attended the OS/2 V1 dog 'n' pony show in NYC and I was not impressed... though it did take some serious "discussions" with our guys "out in the trenches" to stay away from it. Besides, Phar Lap's DOS Extender was so simple and DesqView386 was no effort at all - it just worked. -- Rgds, George Macdonald I'm sure you recall that OS/2 was supposed to do all that stuff while running on a 286 PC/AT. del I still remember the PS/2 rollout in 1987. I was working for a major oil company, who was a big time IBM client (millions and millions of dollars each and every year). One of the big conference rooms was turned over to IBM, and they had several sharply dressed sales-droids there to "present" the new PS/2 computers. I remember being totally underwhelmed that they were trying to sell us 286 based computers. It still seems totally insane to me that anyone would have spent serious money to engineer a new 286 computer a year after the 386 computers had reached the market. Looking back on it all now, it still seems to me that the PS/2 was the biggest fiasco of the entire computer revolution. I used OS/2 for a while, and I still think OS/2 was better than Windows 95. But the PS/2, now that was a fiasco from beginning to end. |
#19
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
On Sat, 04 Feb 2006 09:17:04 -0500, George Macdonald wrote:
On Fri, 3 Feb 2006 19:06:45 -0600, "Del Cecchi" wrote: "George Macdonald" wrote in message ... On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:10:29 GMT, Robert Redelmeier wrote: EdG wrote in part: Well .... I didn't buy my two AMD64's for their 64-bit, it was basically icing on the cake, Sorta like the 386s? I consider the uptake of AMD64 to be nothing short of phenomenal in comparison. In a far more entrenched and less geeky market, we have day one OSes and a remarkable amount of support. Even from the known laggard, MS. IIRC the 386 had to wait 5 years for runnable OSes (IIRC, OS/2 v2 and non-beta Linux). Apps followed, and will this time too. There *were* the 386 DOS Extenders and Desqview386 which was a very solid multitasking environment, long before Windows 3.0 came along or was even worth looking at. With a coupla nudges here & there, things could have turned out very differently. In the corporate market, the IBM/M$ "promise" of OS/2 V1 had a serious effect in slowing down 32-bit Protected Mode uptake. I'm sure we still have the "notices" from our big clients warning us of the requirements for OS/2 V1 versions of our software to fit their scheduled transition; fortunately we ignored them... never happened. I'd attended the OS/2 V1 dog 'n' pony show in NYC and I was not impressed... though it did take some serious "discussions" with our guys "out in the trenches" to stay away from it. Besides, Phar Lap's DOS Extender was so simple and DesqView386 was no effort at all - it just worked. -- Rgds, George Macdonald I'm sure you recall that OS/2 was supposed to do all that stuff while running on a 286 PC/AT. Yeah well that was the big mistake. Back then even Intel took the stance that the 386 was only for those "who really needed it" - they thought the same with 486... and even had a slew of 386 support chips still in the pipeline when 486 came out. It can only be taken as a "big mistake" in hindsight. 90% of the systems being shipped were 286's and the installed base was huge. ...forgetting that the '386 was expensive. Dell, you more than most, know that IBM is all about protecting customer's investments. These systems weren't $400 Dells. But "all that stuff" I mentioned included the 32-bit flat memory model - that was the killer for doing real computing on a desktop. A lot of mainframe code got converted to Phar Lap's DOS Extender. Wunnerful, but that's hardly the point. -- Keith |
#20
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Whatever happened to x86-64?
"Henry Nettles" noone@nowhere wrote in message ... Looking back on it all now, it still seems to me that the PS/2 was the biggest fiasco of the entire computer revolution. I used OS/2 for a while, and I still think OS/2 was better than Windows 95. But the PS/2, now that was a fiasco from beginning to end. Their legacy is only in "PS/2" mouse interface and keyboard connectors. |
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