[ Thanks to Robert
McMillan for this link. ]
“After years of hype and anticipation, Intel Corp. is about to
make the leap into the big leagues. In the second quarter of this
year, the Santa Clara, CA chip-maker will join the likes of Sun,
IBM, and SGI as a maker of 64-bit microprocessors in the hopes of
penetrating the serious enterprise customer base that is the bread
and butter of these companies.”
“The release of Intel’s first 64-bit processor, called
Itanium, is expected to mark a sea change in the Unix workstation
and server market, putting great pressure on other RISC
(Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor platforms and
catapulting Linux into a critical role as the key Unix operating
system on a platform backed by one of the most successful
high-technology companies on the planet.”
“Itanium is not a RISC platform but instead a new architecture
developed by Intel and Hewlett-Packard, known as Epic (Explicitly
Parallel Instruction Computing). Most desktop computers are either
16- or 32-bit. The number of bits is the size of the basic data
unit used internally by the chip, which usually determines the
amount of information that can be processed at a time. The amount
of memory that the chip can use is determined by the size of the
address bus, which is typically also 64 bits in a 64-bit chip. The
move from 32-bit to 64-bit processors increases the maximum amount
of memory that can be addressed directly from 4 Gbytes to 16 Ebytes
(or 16 million terabytes). Intel engineers compare this huge
increase to the difference between the distance one can throw a
heavy ball and the distance between Earth and the sun.”