[GTALUG] life expectancy of 32-bit x86 [was Re: Fedora Netinstall] [long]

Stewart C. Russell scruss at gmail.com
Tue Feb 13 19:26:51 EST 2018


On 2018-02-11 01:06 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> - irrelevant aside: many 64-bit ARM SOCs don't support more than 2G or
>   3G of RAM.  This seems crazy to me since the first use-case of
>   64-bit is to support wider pointers.

Most ARMs are just application processors. If you're building a set-top
box, you don't want to pay for all of those extra address lines you'll
never use. While it's not about the RAM, Chris Tyler at Seneca gives an
interesting talk about how 64-bit ARM does some rather clever
vectorization by working with 128-bit vectors internally.

I'm guessing the demand for ARM as anything other than application
processor isn't there yet. Witness AMD's Opteron A1100: production has
been scaled back, possibly even stopped. In theory you can still get a
$600 A1100 dev box from SoftIron, but it's not readily available.

> Almost NO 32-bit x86 chips are in current production.  I think that
> Intel has some goofy SoCs for IoT applications that are limited to
> 32-bit but they really don't matter.

No, they canned that line last year. They really were not very good.

 Stewart


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