Re: "Faster, More Powerful . 64 Bits!"

From: Mike Swaim (mpswaim_at_mdanderson.org)
Date: 03/15/04 

Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 09:55:27 -0600

Dennis Landi wrote:
> <quote>
> The ability to address up to 18 exabytes of memory means that you
> cache databases, complex 3D environments, or even entire operating
> systems into RAM, making them much faster than if they were run off a
> hard drive.

  One of the machines that I worked on at my last job had 12 Gig of RAM, and
we used a fairly big chunck of that to store intermediate data. Writing the
results took as long as reading in the inital data and doing the
calculations. (That was with 5 threads doing parallel writes to the
database, using Oracle's array syntax to write blocks of 10,000 rows at a
time.)
  Oddly enough, the conversion of 10 year old code from 32 to 64 bits went
pretty smoothly. 

--
Mike Swaim swaim@hal-pc.org at home | Quote: "Boingie"^4 Y,W & D
MD Anderson Dept. of Biostatistics & Applied Mathmatics
mpswaim@mdanderson.org or mswaim@odin.mdacc.tmc.edu at work
Disclaimer: Yeah, like I speak for MD Anderson.