Why are still not at 64 bits [was Can't figure out Firefox Plugin Requirement ]

[Bill McGonigle]

On Feb 14, 2007, at 22:22, Paul Lussier wrote:

> I find it mind-boggling that the Alpha came out what, 16-18 years ago
> with 64 bit technology and it *still* hasn't caught on in the
> mainstream.  Why is that?

I remember porting povray to the alpha back when they still called it  
OSF/1, and it was a minor bitch to get done and didn't really provide  
any benefit (other than it would compile).  I did learn how to bring  
the entire cs cluster to a crawl, though with my hacked up  
distributed computing system :) (Wayne, thanks for showing me 'nice').

x86-64 actually has one additional benefit - in 64 bit mode you  
actually have enough registers on the chip such that the compiler can  
behave in a civilized manner and you don't have to keep storing  
addresses in main memory (or more likely its cache).  So, typical  
program execution gets faster on this one particular architecture -  
none of the others have this problem in 32-bit space.

Things I don't know:
   * are there outstanding driver issues on x86-64 with linux?
   * are there any gotchas with running 32-bit apps under a linux  
that's native to x86-64?

-Bill
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