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From: cprice@mips.COM (Charlie Price)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: MIPS, Compaq and Microsoft in bed - NYT story
Message-ID: <45924@mips.mips.COM>
Date: 14 Feb 91 22:09:05 GMT
References: <29920@usc> <45758@mips.mips.COM> <3188@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Sender: news@mips.COM
Reply-To: cprice@mips.COM (Charlie Price)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Inc
Lines: 29

In article <3188@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <45758@mips.mips.COM> cprice@mips.COM (Charlie Price) writes:
>
>| The important aspect of a 64-bit machine is that the user
>| program virtual address space can be larger than 32 bits.
>| If you want a nice flat big linear space to play with as you
>| like, then you have to have big addresses.
>| If you have big addresses, presumably you want to be able to
>| manipulate them easily and that means same-sized registers
>| and integer operations.
>
>  I agree that 64 bit ints are useful in solving certain problems, I
>just don't buy the argument that useful work can't be done if the size
>of int isn't the size of a pointer.

Others have already followed up pointing this out,
but let me emphasize that I said that manipulating big addresses
easily (by which I meant effortlessly) means having same-sized
registers and (same-sized) integer operations.

I did not mean to imply that an "int" type in C for example,
would need to be 64 bits.
The width used for scalar types in higher-level programming
languages is a separate issue.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough about that.

-- 
Charlie Price    cprice@mips.mips.com        (408) 720-1700
MIPS Computer Systems / 928 Arques Ave. / Sunnyvale, CA   94086-23650