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To: steve harris who wrote (103251)	10/19/2003 7:52:19 AM
From: TechieGuy-alt	Respond to of 275872

File servers are slowed by the drives, no 64 bit advantage there. Running 32 bit applications on a 64bit cpu on an application server is no advantage. Don't underestimate the advantage of seamlessly addressing > 4GB of memory by the OS itself- even if it's only hosting 32bit programs or just files. 1. > 4GB memory can cache a lot of the files being frequently accessed in the IO cache thus significantly speeding up the apparent speed of the file server. 2. A 64bit OS serving 32bit apps can move itself out of the way and give entire 4GB's to each app, rather than limit the total amount of memory for all apps to 2GB as in a 32bit (Win) OS on a 4GB 32 bit x86 machine (the OS takes the other 2GB). Potentially HUGE wins in both cases. Solves very real world problems when you are dealing with servers that are loaded (or can be loaded) with the max amount of memory that today's 32bit CPU's/OS's allow. TG

To: steve harris who wrote (103251)	10/19/2003 10:38:22 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

RE:"I see little advantage AMD64 has over Intel 32, thus giving Intel plenty of time to FUD and catch up." I agree, AMD lovers should be very careful here. BE very skeptical when you think that Microsoft is suddenly going to ditch Intel and start to support only AMD64. SO far, MS is dragging their feet on a X86-64 OS (in BETA)and Intel can easily slip in there with some FUD 64 bit extensions on prescott and steal the show. Microsoft wants to sell OS's why would they go to the trouble of helping just AMD with 16% market share and the expense of Intel?

To: steve harris who wrote (103251)	10/19/2003 8:02:10 PM
From: pgerassi	Respond to of 275872

Dear Steve: On large DB servers, they cache the data. A typical rule of thumb is 10% of the data set size. Thus a 1TB database would normally be run on a server with 100GB of main memory. A 8 node dual Opteron cluster has 128GB which can run such a RDBMS with that large a data set. You would need a 32 node dual Xeon box to do the same even if the Xeons were as fast as the Opterons. Since they aren't, you see the problem with a 4GB limit. The number of Xeons required actually goes up even more since the 32 bit OS takes some of the memory in each node. A 64 bit OS takes less as a percentage of main memory. The extra main memory is a huge advantage. With Linux, any unused memory is used to cache all mounted storage, ie. disk. Pete