Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!gatech!bloom-beacon!mit-vax!hqm
From: hqm@mit-vax.LCS.MIT.EDU (Henry Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: More than 32 bits needed where?
Message-ID: <3552@mit-vax.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 13 Feb 88 20:23:43 GMT
References: <4340@ames.arpa> <28200094@ccvaxa>
Reply-To: hqm@mit-vax.UUCP (Henry Minsky)
Organization: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge
Lines: 20

In article <28200094@ccvaxa> aglew@ccvaxa.UUCP writes:
>
>>It kind of makes me wonder about many of the whizzy new processors; why
>>would anyone go to all the trouble to design and implement a new machine
>>with only a 32-bit bus?  If the new machines are as fast as reputed, then
>>probably Lisp users will want to run larger tasks than they can address.
>>What shall I do when my Sun-4 (or whatever) has 4 gigabytes of swapping
>>space and it's not enough?
>>
>>						-- Jay Freeman
>


In fact, the new Symbolics Ivory lisp-machine microprocessor addresses
words, not bytes, and the words are 40 bits long (32 bit address + 8 tag).
So, you get 4 Gwords which is a little more than 16 Gbytes. Still,
people's applications expand to fill all available memory...


Henry Minsky, Symbolics Inc.