From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu Jun  6 10:47:12 2002
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Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 12:47:54 -0500 (CDT)
From: Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com>
To: David Miller <dmiller@sparks.net>
Cc: Miguel Mendez <flynn@energyhq.homeip.net>,
	Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>,
	<freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: allocating memory
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On Thu, 6 Jun 2002, David Miller wrote:

> Are there any estimates of when freebsd will move to 64 bits on the
> upcoming sledgehammer CPU from AMD?

Rumor has it that adding such support will be relatively easy once actual
hammer hardware appears.  I believe that a few people had been working on
adding such support, but they became fed up with the slowness of emulation
and decided to wait.

See the paper on porting NetBSD to hammer that was presented at some
recent usenix convention for more info.  (I think it was usenix, but I'm
not sure.)

> It's my guess that it will be the first affordable, widely available, 64
> bit system out there.  The itanium certainly looks like it was a
> stillbirth, and rumors have Intel working on something more like the
> sledgehammer.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --- David

I wouldn't be so quick to say that... Itanium 2 is only a few months away
now, and it's supposedly much better.  It'll probably only be a year or
two before Intel manages to make the architecture desireable to a large
number of people.  I doubt they'll ever quite match IBM's top chips in
speed, but they'll probably produce 50x more chips at 10% of the price.

Mike "Silby" Silbersack


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