Linus wasn't saying that 64-bit is unusual, but rather that 32-bit is so passé and pedestrian that the bleeding edge users long since left it, and there are no (or very few) bleeding edge users using 32-bit i686 to try strange and wonderful combinations of settings.
His statement wasn't an indictment of 64-bit as being "new and unusual" so much as a statement about 32-bit i686 being waaay too uninteresting for the tinkerer crowd.
Even the embedded x86 crowd has 64-bit CPUs to play with now, so even those folks don't necessarily have to stay on 32-bit....
Yeah, I'd definitely vote that Linus is out of touch. On the other hand, most x86 class machines out there still run 32-bit software even though they're on AMD64/EMT64 CPUs. I blame that on an inferior OS wannabe. Come on - I've been using 64-bit machines since 1994 and other people have been using them for longer; it's hardly "the edge", it's more a case of a lot of the world being backward. The 64-bit data (wide wide) word goes back to ~1961. The >32bit addressing was a much later development; with the cost of RAM even in the mid-1970's, enormous RAM was just not economical - we're talking from 10's of M (late 1970s) up to billions of $$ per GB (early 1970s). Anyone know of a multi-billion $ supercomputer from that era?
Rather than bigger physical and virtual address space, really useful for processes that need to allocate about > 4 GiB of memory (and can drive to slight decrease of performance since math on 64 bit addresses is slower), the switch to x86-64 also doubles the general purpose and mmx registers, and here comes the major performance increase. It was not the case of SPARC, where SUN suggested 32-bit for particular binaries since they could be faster than 64 bit counterparts (and no additional features apart larger address space) nor the Alpha of cource since they never deployed a 32 bit version.
I don't know
I'd prefer to think of 64-bit for people who dream of a better world.
I think you missed the point
Linus wasn't saying that 64-bit is unusual, but rather that 32-bit is so passé and pedestrian that the bleeding edge users long since left it, and there are no (or very few) bleeding edge users using 32-bit i686 to try strange and wonderful combinations of settings.
His statement wasn't an indictment of 64-bit as being "new and unusual" so much as a statement about 32-bit i686 being waaay too uninteresting for the tinkerer crowd.
Even the embedded x86 crowd has 64-bit CPUs to play with now, so even those folks don't necessarily have to stay on 32-bit....
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Program Intellivision and play Space Patrol!
out of touch
Yeah, I'd definitely vote that Linus is out of touch. On the other hand, most x86 class machines out there still run 32-bit software even though they're on AMD64/EMT64 CPUs. I blame that on an inferior OS wannabe. Come on - I've been using 64-bit machines since 1994 and other people have been using them for longer; it's hardly "the edge", it's more a case of a lot of the world being backward. The 64-bit data (wide wide) word goes back to ~1961. The >32bit addressing was a much later development; with the cost of RAM even in the mid-1970's, enormous RAM was just not economical - we're talking from 10's of M (late 1970s) up to billions of $$ per GB (early 1970s). Anyone know of a multi-billion $ supercomputer from that era?
Read his comment again,
Read his comment again, please, you've got it backwards.
Rather than bigger physical
Rather than bigger physical and virtual address space, really useful for processes that need to allocate about > 4 GiB of memory (and can drive to slight decrease of performance since math on 64 bit addresses is slower), the switch to x86-64 also doubles the general purpose and mmx registers, and here comes the major performance increase. It was not the case of SPARC, where SUN suggested 32-bit for particular binaries since they could be faster than 64 bit counterparts (and no additional features apart larger address space) nor the Alpha of cource since they never deployed a 32 bit version.
Alpha
Alpha could run code in a 32-bit "TASO" (Truncated Address Space Option) mode. Dimdows NT for Alpha was only 32-bit.