Why are still not at 64 bits

[Ben Scott]

On 2/15/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:
>> From an end-user perspective, do they need to care or know?
>
>  They would care if they knew what it would do for them.

  What would AMD64 (or even the Alpha's feature set) do for the
typical end-user?  I'm talking about the people browsing the web and
writing email and downloading music and looking at porn.  These people
aren't doing 6-way SQL JOIN's or loading the entire US phone book into
RAM.  Their PC is plenty fast enough, so long as you clean out all the
adware and viruses and other badware.

>       Only in Vista have they actually used a 64-bit ADDRESS SPACE.
>       Their claims to "64-bit" before have been limited to data types,
>       and (perhaps) data flow through cache and other pipelines.

  Correction: Windows 2003 R2 x64 supports a full 64-bit address
space, and I'm pretty sure Win XP Pro x64 does as well.  See my other
message in this thread about how support for those sucks, though.

-- Ben