Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Be Prepared...
Keywords: Lots Of Memory
Message-ID: <3197@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 14 Feb 91 13:55:04 GMT
References: <1991Feb13.160718.25759@visix.com>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 28

In article <1991Feb13.160718.25759@visix.com> jeff@nsx (Jeff Barr) writes:
| Voracious_users_of_memory and assumers_that_sizeof(char *)==sizeof(int):
| 
| Note that people who are building new processor chips (e.g.
| the MIPS R4000) say that by 1993 typical high-end micro-based systems
| are going to have more than 4 gigabytes of address space, and in many
| cases this much real memory.  

  I guess if you define high end micros to mean those with 4GB of
memory, then this will be true. There will always be problems which can
use this much memory, but somehow I can't see why there would be that
much memory on a typical system. As long as cost and failure rate are
related to memory size in some fairly linear way, I think there will be
a better fit of hardware to use.

  I suspect that 90% of the users of computers never run finite element
analysis, linear regression, or anything else which takes 4GB. They
read mail, edit files, develop software, do graphics, and generally don't do
anything intensive. You can even run GNUemacs under X-windows without
paging if you allow about 32MB per user. Serious graphics (4k x 4k x
24bit) will only take 50MB/image, so you can reasonably run anything
remotely well written in 512MB, and even that could legitimately be
called a special case.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
  "I'll come home in one of two ways, the big parade or in a body bag.
   I prefer the former but I'll take the latter" -Sgt Marco Rodrigez