rude "The notion that a 64 bit system can in general accomplish twice the work of a 32 bit system is silly too. 64 bit systems have an advantage when large flat address space memory is needed - databases are the most obvious example. They have some advantage when working with floating point data. They have almost no advantage in working with 32 bit data, which happens to be the bulk of data out there."
As you know there are programs capable of converting 32bit dependent data to 64bit specific. So, if a company begins installing all 64bit systems, replacing their current 32bit, they can run these programs for conversion. The conversion isn't cheap and it takes time (although not significant as it used to be - quotes were a year for large organizations such as Dell converting, now it's down to 2 to 3 months), but this is part of the solution that Intel, Dell, and SUNW are presenting. The market ran up companies like MIGR for a while based on all these conversion codes needing done. MIGR is Dell's, Sunw's and Intel's choice - what is your take on these conversions?
It seems reasonable that if Itanium and McKinley take off, these migration specialists should gather contracts instead of dust
migratech.com
..."The migration from 32 to 64-bit platforms will make the Y2K bug seem like a warm-up exercise because there are untold billions of lines of C and C++ code that are critical to enterprise applications.
Organizations will have to either develop new 64-bit applications or migrate their existing 32-bit applications to the 64-bit architecture. Rewriting existing 32-bit applications in order to build 64-bit applications will be very costly for businesses, perhaps even more so than the Y2K fixes. Migrating code manually is extremely time-consuming and could put enterprises at a competitive disadvantage to aggressive startups that could build new applications from scratch without worrying about supporting legacy systems.
Intel's agreement to collaborate with MigraTEC [see press release dated 05/02/2000] positions MigraTEC as a key player in helping Intel proliferate the IA-64 architecture more quickly. By automating migration of applications to the new platform, MigraTEC's technology makes it possible for enterprises to more quickly adopt the Intel® Itaniumtm architecture because they can leverage their existing IT investment and do not have to build new applications from the beginning. |
