Newbie question about text encoding
Dave Angel
davea at davea.name
Thu Feb 26 20:57:42 EST 2015
On 02/26/2015 08:05 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Rustom Mody wrote:
>
>
>> eg consider the case of 32 vs 64 bit executables.
>> The 64 bit executable is generally larger than the 32 bit one
>> Now consider the case of a machine that has say 2GB RAM and a 64-bit
>> processor. You could -- I think -- make a reasonable case that all those
>> all-zero hi-address-words are 'waste'.
>
> Sure. The whole point of 64-bit processors is to enable the use of more than
> 2GB of RAM. One might as well say that using 32-bit processors is wasteful
> if you only have 64K of memory. Yes it is, but the only things which use
> 16-bit or 8-bit processors these days are embedded devices.
But the 2gig means electrical address lines out of the CPU are wasted,
not address space. A 64 bit processor and 64bit OS means you can have
more than 4gig in a process space, even if over half of it has to be in
the swap file. Linear versus physical makes a big difference.
(Although I believe Seymour Cray was quoted as saying that virtual
memory is a crock, because "you can't fake what you ain't got.")
--
DaveA
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