We want 64-bit now

[Death-Dude]

This seemed more like hardware than UT2K3 news, so I put it here. This from AMDMB.com (http://www.amdmb.com/index.php), a very good hardware site, with very helpful forums. They got it at Slashdot.org (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54835&cid=5371889).


We need 64-bit TODAY (Score:5, Insightful)
by Tim Sweeney (59452) on Monday February 24, @01:56PM (#5371889)
Intel's claims are wholly out of touch with reality.

On a daily basis we're running into the Windows 2GB barrier with our next-generation content development and preprocessing tools.

If cost-effective, backwards-compatible 64-bit CPU's were available today, we'd buy them today. We need them today. It looks like we'll get them in April.

Any claim that "4GB is enough" or that address windowing extensions are a viable solution are just plain nuts. Do people really think programmers will re-adopt early 1990's bank-swapping technology?

Many of these upcoming Opteron motherboards have 16 DIMM slots; you can fill them with 8GB of RAM for $800 at today's pricewatch.com prices. This platform is going to be a godsend for anybody running serious workstation apps. It will beat other 64-bit workstation platforms (SPARC/PA-RISC/Itanium) in price/performance by a factor of 4X or more. The days of $4000 workstation and server CPU's are over, and those of $1000 CPU's are numbered.

Regarding this "far off" application compatibility, we've been running the 64-bit SuSE Linux distribution on Hammer for over 3 months. We're going to ship the 64-bit version of UT2003 at or before the consumer Athlon64 launch. And our next-generation engine won't just support 64-bit, but will basically REQUIRE it on the content-authoring side.

We tell Intel this all the time, begging and pleading for a cost-effective 64-bit desktop solution. Intel should be listening to customers and taking the leadership role on the 64-bit desktop transition, not making these ridiculous "end of the decade" statements to the press.

If the aim of this PR strategy is to protect the non-existant market for $4000 Itaniums from the soon-to-be massive market for cost-effective desktop 64-bit, it will fail very quickly.

-Tim Sweeney, Epic Games

[ME BIGGD01]

hey thats a frequent site i visit along the forums there. i like the way they list all manufacturers in sections so people can visit there and see there board. one problem i noticed is there are alot of people claiming about problems but are due to I D 10 T faults.

good post. i am looking forward just to see what it does in performance but really most wont see a differnce if they arent using the apps to benefit the 64 bit.

[Death-Dude]

Yeah, I'm hoping the bigger, richer companies are forward-looking, like the Unreal crew is. I know M$ has a 64-bit OS they are running on the prototypes. I'm sure there'll be a period of growing pains, but worth it in the end. Have you seen the MBs with 32- and 64-bit PCI slots? I'll try to look one up, but I wondered what components there are to put in that could utilize that. :hmmm:

[Dissectional]

Microstink has a Win2K 64-bit Server version openly available to the public. IBM already is making iSeries servers with the PCI-X standard. I know this ins't the consumer market, but IBM's server all run that PCI-X now...and that is nasty fast.

Bringing that kind of speed to the desktop would be amazing...PC enthusiasts like most of us here, wouldn't know what to do with all that speed. Most of us could never stress our systems with anything we ran.

I love it, more for work than play. I would love to see our collections of servers cooking at that rate.

[ME BIGGD01]

my dual amd mp system has the 64 bit slots and i use for scsi card and network card. this is what runs the doa server. what we need is better software to run all this power. the cpu's today are more than fast enough and so is the video cards. we need faster hd's and pci bus. it's coming but keep one step back.