Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!ncar!husc6!spdcc!esegue!johnl
From: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 64-bit addresses
Message-ID: <1990Feb28.054006.5689@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us>
Date: 28 Feb 90 05:40:06 GMT
References: <9708@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <20270@cfctech.cfc.com> <36080@mips.mips.COM> <168@csinc.UUCP> <193@zds-ux.UUCP> <36439@mips.mips.COM> <52651@bbn.COM> <3786@uceng.UC.EDU>
Reply-To: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Distribution: all
Organization: Segue Software, Cambridge MA
Lines: 24

In article <3786@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>Now that this barrier is history, how long will we wait for the following?
>
>1. The value of computers sold with 1 GB of physical memory to
>exceed 1% of the total computer market value.

Probably already has happened.  I suspect that IBM's highest end machines are
now routinely sold with > 1GB of RAM.   After all, a year ago they introduced
a segmented architecture called ESA/370 to circumvent the 2GB per process
address space limit of the XA architecture they introduced about 5 years
before that.  (Before that it was 16MB virtual, 64MB physical.)

At $10M apiece, these machines constiture a large fraction of the computer
market by value, if not by numbers.

>I am sure that someday 2-4GB addressing limits will be constraining,
>but this would seem to require major advances in software technology.

Not so, you can be sure that they wouldn't have done ESA if the customers
hadn't been screaming for it.
-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 864 9650
johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {ima|lotus|spdcc}!esegue!johnl
"Now, we are all jelly doughnuts."