Notebook Makers Moving to 4 GB Memory As Standard

akintayo writes "Digitimes reports that first-tier notebook manufacturers are increasing the standard installed memory from the current 1 GB to 4GB. They claim the move is an attempt to shore up the costs of DRAM chips, which are currently depressed because of a glut in market. The glut is supposedly due to increased manufacturing capacity and the slow adoption of Microsoft's Vista operating system. The proposed move is especially interesting, given that 32-bit Vista and XP cannot access 4 GB of memory. They have a practical 3.1 — 3.3 GB limit. With Vista SP1 it seems that Microsoft has decided to fix the problem by reporting the installed memory rather than the available memory."

That's great

[G-News.ch (793321)]

Because OS X Leopard CAN access 4GB of RAM. Let's see if Apple also joins the fray. Then again, 4GB is way too much, because after all 640KB should be enough for everyone.

Re:That's great

[boredMDer (640516)]

'...because after all 640KB should be enough for everyone.'

Nope, that isn't played out.

At all.

And of course... [wired.com]:
"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

Silly quotations do have a way of floating like rumors.

Well, the truth starts here.

He never said it.

Re:That's great

[LaughingCoder (914424)]

I like the fact that your \. ID is in the 640Ks

Re:That's great

[ShieldW0lf (601553)]

The really interesting thing about all this is, if the market continues to reject Vista on the basis that it's bad technology even when it's working properly, and they consider their choices to consist of either sticking with the Windows XP that they know or taking a risk on the Linux upstart which seems to have a trustworthy reputation, the simple fact that Linux is 64 bit could make it the only performance contender around on commodity hardware.

When Vista isn't an acceptable option, you don't own a Mac, and you've got a gig of ram sitting there unused, that's a pretty powerful pressure to use another operating system.

Re:That's great

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

He never said it.

He may not have said it, but he believed it;

Bill Gates Challenges and Strategy Memo (16 May 1991)

I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within--oh five or six years people were complaining.

Re:That's great

[Joe U (443617)]

Basically, Microsoft and IBM decided that the color video buffer should always be at $A000, which pretty much limited you to 640K.

Since the processor at the time only could access 1MB, 640K of the 1MB was enough for DOS and the 8088. Now, when the 80286 arrived, things changed. The 286 had a 16MB limit, but DOS was still acting like it was a 8088 (some part for compatibility, some for poor design switching between real/protected modes).

Re:That's great

[Macthorpe (960048)]

You should have just gotten an Apple and you are able to run most any OS that you want

Wow, for a minute there you almost had me believing that the only reason I can't do that on any other machine is because of artificial restrictions that Apple enforce.

How about I stick to what I have now so I don't have to buy an overpriced desktop, and then if Apple decide that I'm allowed to run OS X on something they didn't build, I might consider booting it.

Unlikely, though.

Re:That's great

[Ilgaz (86384)]

You should have just gotten an Apple and you are able to run most any OS that you want

Wow, for a minute there you almost had me believing that the only reason I can't do that on any other machine is because of artificial restrictions that Apple enforce.

How about I stick to what I have now so I don't have to buy an overpriced desktop, and then if Apple decide that I'm allowed to run OS X on something they didn't build, I might consider booting it.

Unlikely, though.

My overpriced Quad G5 which is 2 years old has 16GB Max memory spec and I actually saw it in use on a Pro DTP Workstation.

When I bought it, it was same price as a Quad Xeon workstation. I was happy with the G5 Technology (unlike G4-Laptop guys) so I opted in for Quad G5.

What Apple lacks are
1) A complete image fix of iMac series. Even if iMac performs 3x faster than a "Black Box Desktop PC", it won't be taken serious.
2) A mini Tower with 2x more space so they won't be bothering with 5400 RPM HD, integrated Gfx card. I am speaking about a bigger Mac Mini.

For generic PC running OS X? Half of OS X'es power comes from Apple knowing their desktop stuff out there and Taiwan no-name card manufacturers can't manage to get into those machines.

Re:That's great

[Macthorpe (960048)]

Well, there are technical limitations, yes. You can't run a PPC version of Linux on an Intel processor, for example, nor can you run Windows on a PPC Mac.

The very existence of OSx86 [wikipedia.org] shows that it's not a technical limitation that prevents OS X working on any machine you like.

Re:That's great

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

Any of them do.

There is nothing in this world that a bit of elbow grease, duct tape and a hacksaw cannot do.

s/nothing/very little/

[pjt33 (739471)]

Surely you should say "There's very little in this world...". Otherwise all /.ers would have girlfriends.

Re:s/nothing/very little/

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

If you followed my instructions at the very least you would have part of a girlfriend and an arrest warrant.

Re:That's great

[bhtooefr (649901)]

Uh, what?

Running a 64-bit OS, you can access the board's maximum (there aren't any boards that can max out the 40 or 48-bit address space of existing EM64T/AMD64 CPUs) memory.

Running a 32-bit non-Windows OS with PAE enabled, you can access up to 16 GiB (2^36 bytes) of physical RAM.

Running a 32-bit Windows server OS with PAE enabled, you can also access up to 16 GiB of RAM.

However, even with PAE enabled, Windows XP and Vista 32-bit won't let you access anything past 4 GiB, because of some legacy hardware that could barf if it were handed an address higher than 4 GiB.

Re:That's great

[TheThiefMaster (992038)]

Apparently PAE support was disabled in 32-bit XP (but not server) because it required all drivers to be PAE compatible, and they just weren't.

For Windows Server, IIRC one of the requirements for MS to sign drivers is PAE compatibility.

Re:That's great

[Locutus (9039)]

I'm wondering if these funky memory addressing issues in Windows were due to it's choice of how to stop OS/2 from running 32bit Windows applications years ago. IIRC, IBM had OS/2 running 32bit Windows apps in a beta of OS/2 about a year before Windows 95 shipped but then one of the Win95 beta's broke this capability. When it was analyzed, it was found that what Microsoft did was changed the application loader so that it pulled a few app resource data structures and plopped them up at around the 1GB address space. OS/2 processes had upto 512MB of address space available to each process and with the Win32 apps poking a number of bits of code up at the high end there was no way for OS/2 to run Win32 apps without IBM changing OS/2's max process address space. IBM eventually did but didn't bother trying to run Windows applications inside of OS/2 any further.

Now here we are with available system memory growing into the multi GB's for standard desktop/laptops and we find that Microsoft Windows applications are running into upper limit issues. Kinda sound like Microsoft could be getting hit with the results from hard-coding/forcing special data structures into places a cleanly designed OS would not run into.

Or not.

LoB

Re:That's great

[laffer1 (701823)]

Microsoft may claim that Windows can address more RAM, but not really. If you look at their KB, you'll see a list of supported motherboards that can address 4GB or more of memory. Those boards are 3 intel chipsets. I have an Intel DP965LT motherboard. I recently bought 2 new 1GB chips to bring my board to 4GB total. I had 64bit vista. The system booted extremely slow, had data corruption on disk and took out my boot loader. An older ubuntu CD allowed me to test RAM, but the 7.10 CD freaked out too. BSD worked fine.

I would say Microsoft is not ready for 4GB+ memory configurations in consumer devices. It may work in servers, but it's not working on the desktop. Conversely, my wife upgraded her Mac from 1GB to 5GB for Leopard the same day. Her Mac Pro is working flawlessly.

DirectX compatibility maps memory from your video card into the 32bit address space which causes problems with windows. The more RAM your video card has, the less your system can have. Further, there is a bug in Vista that double maps it for DirectX 9 support. There is a patch available for that issue. My PC had an ATI x1900 with 512MB. The system is stable with 3GB but more causes problems. If this can happen with a supported chipset, what happens on other systems?

My motherboard claims to support 8GB of RAM. I tried several different versions of the BIOS. The Vista x64 ultimate installer doesn't even work right with 4GB in. I just decided to go back to XP Pro after that experience. The point of Vista is gone in my book.

Re:That's great

[Ephemeriis (315124)]

I don't see your average joe 6-pack user benefiting from more than 2gigs.

There is no such thing as too much RAM. If you have it, you'll use it. Sure, 512 MB is enough to make a machine run...that's what I usually recommend as the bare minimum for an XP machine... 1 GB is better of course... But even if you've got 2+ GB you'll use it. Your average home user has the OS, antivirus of some kind, a couple different instant messengers, a web browser, a media player, maybe some games or an email client, and a crapton of automatic updaters all running at the same time.

And that's all assuming the computer isn't full of crapware and that they don't play any real games.

I've always told people that the quickest and easiest way to see a real speed increase in your computer is to upgrade the RAM, and that's still true today. Anything you add up to around the 3 GB limit where XP falls over is almost guaranteed to improve performance. There is always something being paged out to disk that would probably be happier sitting in RAM. There is always something that could be pre-fetched or cached.

Re:That's great

[justin12345 (846440)]

I'm sorry, I can never keep this straight: Is Joe Sixpack a jock or a drunk? Or both?

Re:That's great

[RulerOf (975607)]

Have you ever actually used a computer?

Joe Sixpack benefits from a computer that runs faster, swaps less, and has a shorter boot time. In fact, I'd wager that he gets more benefit from memory than the typical /. user's second box.

A friend of mine was running an XP computer with 512 of ram. He couldn't play Warcraft III at acceptable frame rates or resolution, and if he hit the windows key on accident, he would be dropped from the game because his computer couldn't swap data fast enough to get him back to his desktop within the 45 seconds that the game gives you to start responding again.
 
After I gutted his computer from all excess hardware (modem, spare NIC, etc.), turned off almost every service that wasn't required to boot the computer, and repartitioned his hard disk, was he able to play the game acceptably and not get screwed by alt-tabbing.
 
So, in short, I agree with you based on experience with "Joe six pack's" computer, and the GP is nuts.

I think they should report it as 640k

[Laglorden (87845)]

for obvious reasons :D

Nice "fix" though, then people can keep adding memory and think it helps :D

Fix the problem by misleading the customer?

[Naito (667851)]

What an ingenious solution! No wonder Microsoft is the leading innovator in IT! That's SO innovative it makes me sick. It's hard enough trying to explain to customers why they shouldn't waste their money on 4GB of memory and a 1GB video card only to lose a quarter of it in real life, now the OS is trying actively trying to make me look like a liar too.

Re:Fix the problem by misleading the customer?

[IhuntCIA (1099827)]

In boot.ini file add switch /PAE at the end of multi(0)disk.. line

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer /PAE

It will not solve Your PR problem nor will solve the problem with incorrect reporting of available RAM, but will allow 32-bit Windows XP Professional to use all of it. In my experience, most programs / games can't use all 4GB of RAM, but if user is running more than one RAM hungry application (multitasks), 4GBs becomes useful.
Also we have to think about future Vista service packs so, 4GB is must have :)

Re:Fix the problem by misleading the customer?

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

In boot.ini file add switch /PAE at the end of multi(0)disk.. line

That's not such a good idea.

The reason PAE mode isn't enabled by default is because it conflicts with DMA. Enabling it may make your Windows system even more unstable.

Re:Fix the problem by misleading the customer?

[Cyberax (705495)]

Vista x64 is a regression in functionality. For one thing, it _requires_ signed drivers.

Re:Fix the problem by misleading the customer?

[Cyberax (705495)]

I don't care about userspace drivers (I'm porting FUSE to Windows in my spare time, for God's sake!).

But Vista requires _signed_ _kernel-mode_ _drivers_. It won't load unsigned drivers, and there's NO user override for this 'feature'. Let me repeat: Microsoft does not allow you to run some types of code on your computer.

You can turn on 'test certificate root' which allows to use self-signed certificate, but it is hard to do for a common user, causes DRMed content to stop playing and displays 'test mode' icon.

Oh just jump to 64bit already MS

[rolfwind (528248)]

Stop with the kludges and force the developers along. 32 bit came with the 386 era and lasted a good while - a very good run indeed. 64 bit would last beyond our lifetimes anyway, I doubt we will even come close to the limits of addressable memory there (hopefully this isn't the new 640k comment) -- so there is no point in stalling it indefinitely.

Re:Oh just jump to 64bit already MS

[_KiTA_ (241027)]

Stop with the kludges and force the developers along. 32 bit came with the 386 era and lasted a good while - a very good run indeed. 64 bit would last beyond our lifetimes anyway, I doubt we will even come close to the limits of addressable memory there (hopefully this isn't the new 640k comment) -- so there is no point in stalling it indefinitely.


Dunno! I have a fun project for you though -- try printing out your comment, popping it into a time capsule, and burying it in your yard. Dig it up in 10 or 20 years and giggle.

For laughs, include some recent computer ads.

Personally, I had a similar moment when buying my first 20 gig HDD about 10 years ago. I remember seeing a 100 GB HDD and marveling at how big it was, and how we'd never, ever use that much space. Now my WinNY/Share (Japanese P2P) folders are over 100 gigs each.

Time is odd.

Re:Oh just jump to 64bit already MS

[NoOneInParticular (221808)]

Don't be too hasty with ridiculing the GP. At a clock speed of 10 Ghz, (which we're not going to reach quickly), simply accessing all the addressable memory of a 64bit machine once (around 18 exabyte), assuming that we can access one byte per CPU cycle (we can't), would take 2^64 / 1e10 / 3600 / 24 / 365 = 58.5 years!

So, to actually make use of a full 64 bit address space, assuming that you would want to go through all memory in less than an hour or so (because if you don't why use RAM?), you would need an SMP type architecture with 512K cores working concurrently on this memory. Given that at 10 Ghz, light can only travel an inch or so, the memory banks should be very close to the CPU's.

But then, 2^67 transistors (the memory banks in bytes), at say a 1 nanometer distance between the transistors (we're now at 45 nm), layed out on a single wafer (2D because the heat needs to dissapate), would have a surface area of a little over 94 acres. So there goes the 10 GHz access speed, and far-away bytes cannot be reached fast enough, needing even more cores to read the damn thing, and more space for these cores.

The difference between past predictions and the current situation, is that we're reaching physical limits, and these are unforgiving. Yes, we might find a need for larger addressable spaces, but it's not going to be RAM, and it's not going to be serial CPU's accessing them.

How can windows suck so much...

[jellomizer (103300)]

Its pathetic how poorly Microsoft has moved towards 64 Bit vs. Other OS's out there...

Solaris Way Back in the 90's with Solaris 7 I think... Had 64 bit support with perfect 32 bit
support of backwards compatability.

OS X goes a step further one OS Package and support for PowerPC, 32 Bit and 64 Bit and Intel 32 Bit
and 64 Bit. And appliactions seem to work for all of theme for the most parts (with the ovious
exceptions of apps that require the advanced features of the newer Chips.

Reporting that you have 4 Gigs installed is not a real feature it just makes it easier for the
hardware companies to scam people saying here buy this with 4 Gigs of Ram and the OS says there is 4
GIgss of Ram while it only supports 3. I would be Pissed If I knew I couldn't access all my RAM.
Say I had VMWare on my Laptop and I allocated a VM with 2 Gigs and an other with 1.5 Gig and ran both
figuring that I had 4 Gigs of Ram available. I would be annoyed that I couldn't run both of my VMs
and Not knowing seeing that it supports 4 gigs of RAM I would want to know who is taking up 512 Megs
of Active Ram. I could blame Windows for being more of a memory hog. I could blame VMWare for sucking
up all the extra memory to run. But the fault is the Hardware Manufacutre put more ram then the
PC with the preinstalled Software can handle to make a few bucks and Microsoft just plays in their
hand making everything look hunky dory.

If it says you have 4 Gigs install It should also say there are 3.3 Gigs that can be access

Re:How can windows suck so much...

[Dak RIT (556128)]

Actually, before you rant about somebody failing at OS knowledge, you should perhaps check your own facts.

He absolutely can use 32-bit drivers in MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) because Leopard hasn't actually gone *completely* 64-bit.... the kernel is still 32-bit to maintain compatibility with 32-bit drivers. In every other meaningful way though Leopard does count as a 64-bit OS, so you really can have 32-bit drivers on a 64-bit OS.

Re:How can windows suck so much...

[CajunArson (465943)]

That just proves my point... you are using 32 bit drivers with a 32 bit kernel!! Having partial 64 bit support at higher levels does NOT give you a 64 bit operating system. There's something else he said in his post that you are overlooking too: He said he uses 32 bit POWER PC DRIVERS in a 64 bit INTEL Macintosh. Please show me how this works... you can't.

Re:How can windows suck so much...

[Bert64 (520050)]

Some "drivers" are actually user land, and will work on intel even tho the were intended for PPC... This is often the case with printer drivers (which are typically little more than a PPD file) and thus the guy claiming to have used ppc drivers on his Intel mac may be telling the truth, but simply unaware of the actual facts. When microsoft made an alpha (as in the cpu) version of windows, you could use x86 printer drivers on them under emulation.

Secondly, leopard's use of a 32bit kernel on intel macs is a bug-bear for me... There was only a very short lived series of 32bit intel macs, which lasted what? less than a year? So now they are limited to compatibility with such a short lived machine, and a future transition to 64bit. They should have used the architecture switch as an opportunity to switch to pure 64bit at the same time. Compatibility wouldn't have been any more of a problem than it already was and it would have set them up for a less bumpy future.

Article doesn't say what summary says

[JOrgePeixoto (853808)]

From the summary: "They claim the move is an attempt to shore up the costs of DRAM chips, which are currently depressed because of a glut in market."

The article says: "While first-tier notebook vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Toshiba are planning to roll out 4GB notebooks starting from the first quarter of 2008, the move is expected to give a boost to the DRAM market, according to memory module makers."

The article does not say that this is a deliberate attempt to increase DRAM price. And if it was, wouldn't it be illegal?

Re:Article doesn't say what summary says

[Rolgar (556636)]

The ones buying the parts are the ones changing the market, by increasing demand. That is legal because the one to profit isn't the one changing the market situation. The RAM chip makers artificially restricting demand at a level below demand would cause a shortage and price spike, and that would be illegal. That is how OPEC controls oil prices to a degree, although its legal because they are sovereign nations instead of businesses.

Solution: Make More Wiis

[Bandman (86149)]

It sounds like they should be making wiis and not memory. Solve a few problems at once

Can we get some parental supervision on this site?

[kma (2898)]

Or at least, supervision by people who know how computers work? 4GB is perfectly sensible for a 32-bit x86; the virtual address space is only 4GB, but the physical address spaces is larger (at least 36 bits on all popular processors). Yes, that means it's awkward to use more than 4GB in a single application, but so what? Using more than 4GB across the system is perfectly transparent.

Also, what's with slamming Microsoft over the "slow" transition to 64-bit? 64-bit XP has been out for, like, three years now. It runs 32-bit applications, because the x64 architecture makes it so ridiculously easy you'd have to intentionally break it. 64-bit Linux does the same, because it takes, like, a line of code to do so. If software makers aren't producing 32-bit apps, it's probably because their customers haven't demanded they do so yet; and the customers probably haven't demanded it because it's unusual for a single application to need 4GB of RAM. Finally, those applications that can frequently use gigondo amounts of RAM in a single virtual address space (e.g., Oracle) for the most part had 64-bit binaries available right out of the gate.

Re:Can we get some parental supervision on this si

[Henry V .009 (518000)]

Windows 32-bit operating systems really do not play well with more than 3Gb of memory. Check out what Microsoft says about it [microsoft.com].

Re:Can we get some parental supervision on this si

[SigILL (6475)]

4GB is perfectly sensible for a 32-bit x86; the virtual address space is only 4GB, but the physical address spaces is larger (at least 36 bits on all popular processors).

The trouble is that in contemporary chipsets in 32-bit mode the upper 1G or so of physical memory overlaps with the address space for the PCI bus.

Is it really due to "glut in market" ?

[GreatBunzinni (642500)]

Laptops, which have been a nice fat cash cow to OEMs, are steadily becoming cheaper and cheaper. Nowadays, we have retailers selling laptops for about 500 euros with specs that a couple of year ago were selling for a lot more than 1500 euros. A while back the average laptop price tag was about 1200 euros and nowadays it went down to 800 euros. That's a heck of a revenue cut.

So the OEMs are forced to add another fancy selling point, like upgrading the specs once again, in order to keep making the big bucks. They don't give a damn if it brings any added value to the product or if it even functions properly. What matters is some fancy little side remark on the laptop's brochure that makes their fancy little product be picked by the vast hordes of consuming sheep. Who cares if it makes sense or if it's even usable. What's important is that them flock falls for that "OMG! IT'S N+1!!!" and promptly spend their cash, specially for the "it's bigger than my neighbour's" bragging rights.

This sort of thing isn't exactly new. In fact, it's the repeat of another similar marketing push, which was the "32-to-64bit" campaign. The fancy stickers advertising the new and improved 64bit 'puters for the "OMG IT'S TWICE THE BITS!!" effect were all over the place, which earned quite a few hardware sales. Yet, the fact is that the brand new 64-bit 'puter could only run on the 32-bit legacy mode, as they were shipped with a 32-bit operating system and the OEMs shipped hardware without ever thinking on releasing 64-bit drivers or even releasing the hardware specs.

So those OEMs will, once again, sell hardware that will not be usable by the user, at least as advertised. It doesn't matter to them. The only thing that matters is the sales revenue, specially in this day and age where we are starting to see sub-300 euro hardware. And screw the consumer.

Re:Is it really due to "glut in market" ?

[eebra82 (907996)]

So the OEMs are forced to add another fancy selling point, like upgrading the specs once again, in order to keep making the big bucks. They don't give a damn if it brings any added value to the product or if it even functions properly. What matters is some fancy little side remark on the laptop's brochure that makes their fancy little product be picked by the vast hordes of consuming sheep. Who cares if it makes sense or if it's even usable. What's important is that them flock falls for that "OMG! IT'S N+1!!!" and promptly spend their cash, specially for the "it's bigger than my neighbour's" bragging rights.

I don't think it's so much about the laptop stickers. It used to be, but something significant has happened lately. You see, three or four years back, the performance of a budget laptop was relatively slow. It feels like the hardware finally caught up with the software (except for games). You can actually buy a 500 laptop because it CAN and WILL perform in almost every everyday application (except for games and such, of course). And it's so cheap because the components are dated and/or low-end enough and cheap to produce. In addition, market got bigger and we all know that the larger the scale of the production, the cheaper it gets to produce as well.

Of course, every now and then, PC makers push the limits to set new standards. For example, TFT panels used to come in 14" and 15" flavors, but nowadays it's kind of difficult to get a screen that small. And it's not like they decided to make more money by setting 17", 19" and 20" standards, because they didn't. The demand for larger panels was there and as technology advanced and more consumers got into flat screens, prices also went down. By today's standards, you can get a 20" screen for what, 250 bucks? A few years ago, getting 15" for 250 bucks was a dream.

Reminds me of an old Microsoft joke

[UnknowingFool (672806)]

How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

None. Microsoft just redefines darkness as the standard.

Re:Reminds me of a new Linux joke

[mangu (126918)]

How many Linux engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

None. Linux lightbulbs last forever. They don't need to be changed.

Re:Reminds me of a new Linux joke

[Fantastic Lad (198284)]

None. They all stand around complaining that the socket isn't compatible with the lightbulb they created from scratch, then demand that the makers of the socket tell them exactly how they built it or they'll sulk in the dark.

Really? Linux works flawlessly in all my light sockets. I guess the system whereby engineers ask for specs from the people who want to sell them light sockets gets the job done.

-FL

Ubuntu

[chill (34294)]

Nothing new here. Ubuntu 7.10 32-bit -- the latest shipping version -- only supports 3.3 Gb or so. They haven't bothered to turn on BigMem in the kernel. I upgraded two desktops and one laptop last week, all to 4 Gb of RAM, and was seriously disappointed when the BIOS showed 4 Gb but Ubuntu did NOT.

Re:Ubuntu

[Inoshiro (71693)]

32-bit OSes can't reach 2^32 bits of memory due to hardware IO ranges. Duh.

So why didn't you install 64-bit Ubuntu? Flash works'n'everything in 7.10 64-bit. VMware? They have 64-bit builds. Everything else I run is FOSS. There is no reason not to install it, AFAICT!

Re:

[boredMDer (640516)]

'I want one of those to run pine and vi!'

OEMs releasing computers with 4GB of memory standard? Finally, we have machines that'll be able to run emacs...

Re:Hey!

[Roane (1075393)]

In another few years, I might be able to run Eclipse.

Re:Makes me feel old

[Metasquares (555685)]

Well back in my day we shifted disks on an abacus and made the beeping noises ourselves! :)

Re:Can someone explain...

[teslar (706653)]

The address space you'd normally use to address memory beyond 3.5gigs (or thereabouts) is reassigned for talking to other stuff. It's a simple 32bit limitation - can't only be talking to the RAM after all. As others have pointed out throughout this thread, the problem does not exist in 64bit architectures.

5 years ago, nobody would have thought that we'd run into this problem at all. Remember those times? Everybody and their mum was just about getting ready to jump onto the 64Bit bandwagon with AMD charging in front. And then, while nobody (especially not AMD) was paying attention, we kinda veered off-course into a multi-core world instead and all of a sudden, people stopped caring about 64bit. After all, you had a larger net performance gain from upgrading to 2 32Bit cores than to one 64Bit one. And now, we're finally running out of address space.

Still doesn't make sense

[Junta (36770)]

AMD and Intel both went with AMD's x86_64 architecture, back in the Pentium 4 days, before any multi-core x86 parts existed. In fact, the first multi-core x86 parts were x86_64 through and through, not any less capable of running 64-bit applications than the single core.

I'm guessing you are confused because of the Intel Core Duo line that was prominent before Core 2 released. The Intel Core line was released after 64-bit P4s not because of inherent multi-core advantages, but because they realized how the NetBurst architecture was not working out, particularly in low TDP mandated environments like laptops (where they currently were using Pentium-M now, derived from Pentium-III). They released Core in an effort to have a more consistant offering, with lower TDP and better per-clock performance, forsaking 64-bit until Core 2 (except the Xeon family, which stuck with NetBurst until 64-bit was available via Core 2). It had nothing to do with multi-core and would have played out that exact same way if it was just single cores.