YDL 4

[Clinton MacDonald]

Ed:

Ed Sutherland wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Apr 2004 17:34:52 +1000, Greg Hamilton wrote:
>>Fresh from Slashdot to you:
> 
> So does this mean I have to wait until May or June for the next version 
> of YDL - the 32-bit version? (I have a G3, do don't know whether I can 
> use the 64-bit version.)

I don't know about your first question, but to your second question (can 
a G3 use the 64-bit version of YDL?), the answer is "No." The 64-bit 
version of YDL is designed to work on Apple's new G5 hardware running on 
IBM's PowerPC 970 series of chips. The "64-bits" bit refers to a chip 
that is designed from the ground up to see a greater amount of RAM than 
a "32-bit" chip. This is a major architectural decision, and the 
operating system (including Apple's Mac OS X) must be updated to take 
advantage of the new abilities. The G3 and G4 are 32-bit chips, and are 
incompatible with 64 bit operating systems. The G5 is a 64-bit chip, and 
can take advantage of greater amounts of RAM.

Why would one want to recognize a greater amount of RAM? Most current 
consumer CPU chips (both Intel and PowerPC) are 32 bit, which limits 
them to seeing about 4 GB of RAM (in reality, about half of that). Not 
many years ago, that limitation was fine, since RAM was incredibly 
expensive, and no one (at least, few consumers) could imagine working on 
projects that might fill even that much RAM (say, a really large 
Photoshop image). 64-bit CPUs can access (theoretically) 2^64 bits (1.8 
x 10^19) of RAM (almost 2 terabytes? have I done the math right?). That 
should last us a while.

Computer professionals who routinely run huge datasets of over 4 GB in 
size have needed access to greater amounts of RAM for a while. Some nice 
(but expensive) systems have been available to them. Only recently have 
consumer operating systems (the Mac OS X and Windows XP) started 
demanding huge amounts of RAM to be comfortable. At the same time, 
consumer applications started having a bigger focus on images, audio, 
and video that are very RAM hungry. 64-bit systems will be the future 
for these types of applications (and, I am sure, someday Microsoft 
[spit] Word will ask for a terabyte of RAM so that I can type a letter 
to my Mom :-) ).

Yellow Dog Linux will be there. The Mac OS X will not be far behind. 
Intel/Microsoft has fallen a bit farther behind (but they have 
tremendous amounts of money and resources to catch up).

That is probably more than you ever wanted to know. Have a nice day!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>