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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pgerassi who wrote (120909)	7/25/2000 2:23:13 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572153

64 bit addressing will first be used in the OS virtual memory portions (like the Linux Kernel), since an application may not need 4GB but many of them combine to need it (sometimes tens of thousands running at once). Er, not exactly. Each process gets its own virtual space, in general starting at address 0; the major part of the virtual address space is reused with each process. To my knowledge, the number of processes which can be active at one time is limited by the OS implementation and allocated swap space on disk; it has nothing to with 32/64 bits. Besides which, I think the Pentium architecture already supports 36 or 40 bits of physical addressing. I couldn't find a quick ref on that, though. E.g., you could hypothetically put 64 or 1000 gigabytes of real memory in a single box, or at least the processor could address it all, if you could manage to implement the rest of the computer. Cheers, Dan.