Interesting read about upcoming K9 processors

"Dean Kent" writes:

It would be supremely embarrassing to Microsoft if Sun gets Solaris for
Opteron out before Windows.

My money is on embarassement...

I guess it's somewhat embarrassing if Sun ships Opteron servers, and
can't offer Solaris to go with them. Microsoft can still afford to
wait, the vast majority of their market is still Intel and 32 bits.

-kzm
--
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Keith wrote:

BTW, 64bit Linux works fine here! It seems Sun is found the light
too. OTOH, Itanic well never see the light, no matter how hard the
pundits push.


It would be supremely embarrassing to Microsoft if Sun gets Solaris for
Opteron out before Windows.

Yousuf Khan



It is apparently ready to ship on their 1,2,and 4-way
Opty servers and W/S that were announced on Monday.
I wonder if Sun had the hardware ready to go for a while
but were waiting on Solaris ?

Ketil Malde wrote:

"Dean Kent" writes:


It would be supremely embarrassing to Microsoft if Sun gets Solaris for
Opteron out before Windows.


My money is on embarassement...


I guess it's somewhat embarrassing if Sun ships Opteron servers, and
can't offer Solaris to go with them. Microsoft can still afford to
wait, the vast majority of their market is still Intel and 32 bits.


I just found a link I'd been looking for:
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/w2100z/
which says that this system ships with Solaris, with
a 64 bit Solaris available "soon".

In comp.arch Bill Davidsen wrote:
Pleasant Thrip wrote:
why do you say that? Maybe there will be particular issues for
applications to make use of all those CPUs but I don't see why it would
be such a big deal for the OS kernel scheduler.

You don't understand the problem... the o/s needs to make all sorts of
decisions about moving a process to another processor to load balance
vs. cost of moving, etc. It is a nasty problem!

Sure it is a nasty problem and I do understand that. But, I'm talking
about the total amount of work for Microsoft here.

How many people do you think would need to be working on the kernel
development for this particular problem as opposed to migrating the
entire Win32 API and attendant APIs such as DirectX to 64-bit? That was
my point. The real world is more than some academic abstraction that
"NUMA is hard" and so on. The real world is about delivering a complete
shrink-wrapped 64-bit Windows XP I can buy.

For those that think the issue was solved with the Itanium/Alpha ports
you obviously aren't Windows programmers nor conversant with the various
APIs.

And if anybody wants to further this discussion, please stick OT. We're
talking _Windows_ here, much as some of you might not like.


IMHO, 64-bits is much harder considering the Win32 API.

Rob Stow wrote:
It would be supremely embarrassing to Microsoft if Sun gets Solaris
for Opteron out before Windows.

Yousuf Khan

It is apparently ready to ship on their 1,2,and 4-way
Opty servers and W/S that were announced on Monday.
I wonder if Sun had the hardware ready to go for a while
but were waiting on Solaris ?

I think it's just the 32-bit Solaris that is shipping right now. I was
referring to the upcoming 64-bit Solaris.

Yousuf Khan

"Dean Kent" wrote:

"Keith" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 04:47:58 +0000, Dean Kent wrote:


A 64bit OS is a slam dunk, though perhaps not from Micro$hit.
Perhaps politics is involved here? Nah Dean, couldn't be!

I don't think so. More likely Windows is a nightmare to code/modify. Some
people like conspiracy theories, however. :-).


BTW, 64bit Linux works fine here! It seems Sun is found the light too.

Linux isn't Windows, and therefore is a completely different argument.

Are you being sarcastic? I'd be amazed if Win32 was not 64-bit clean
from day one. The industry was a lot more mature at that point, and
hopefully learned from the migration of 16- to 32-bit...

chrisv wrote:

Are you being sarcastic? I'd be amazed if Win32 was not 64-bit clean
from day one. The industry was a lot more mature at that point, and
hopefully learned from the migration of 16- to 32-bit...

Surely if Win32 were 64-bit clean, MS wouldn't have had to ship separate
Win64 headers, which they did, to the general horror of everyone who
expected a 64-bit "long".

Furthermore, at the time of its inception, it was far more important for
Win32 code to be Win16 clean, and I doubt if MS could produce headers
that are clean for all three sizes simultaneously.

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 07:45:16 -0500, chrisv
wrote:

"Dean Kent" wrote:

Linux isn't Windows, and therefore is a completely different argument.

Are you being sarcastic?

I don't know whether he's being sarcastic...

I'd be amazed if Win32 was not 64-bit clean
from day one. The industry was a lot more mature at that point, and
hopefully learned from the migration of 16- to 32-bit...

....but I hope you are! :P

--
"Sore wa himitsu desu."
To reply by email, remove
the small snack from address.

In comp.arch Bill Davidsen wrote:
Joe Seigh wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Doesn't sound like Chang believes that Microsoft is trying all that hard to
build a 64-bit OS. It's getting something out to show that it isn't behind
the times.



Going to 64 bits will be trivial compared to going to 64 way for Microsoft.

Yes, since Linux is already NUMA capable 64 CPU is a configuration
option. Still, finding the bandwidth to feed those CPUs is easier if
they have some dedicated RAM (read as: Opteron).


The problem is that if Windows claimed 64 bit compat the same way linux did,
everybody would simply laugh and tell them to make up a better joke...

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

In comp.arch Bill Davidsen wrote:

I've been waiting since Windows 3.1 for a working 32-bit version, don't
ya know?


So you are a loser who bashes MS without knowing any actual details about
teh OS?

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++