Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:36:44 +0100, Daniel Gibson wrote: > Am 30.01.2011 13:29, schrieb Michel Fortin: >> On 2011-01-30 03:05:59 -0500, Gary Whatmore <[email protected]> said: >> >>> D's main focus currently is 32-bit x86 servers and desktop >>> applications. This is where the big market has traditionally been. Not >>> everyone has 64-bit hardware and I have my doubts about the size of >>> the smartphone markets. >> >> I think the important point here is ARM, not smartphones. >> >> ARM processors will soon start to enter other markets, mainly the >> server and laptop markets, > > I'm not sure about these markets, because ARM is stuck to 32bit, 64bit > ARM seems to be (almost?) impossible as far as I know.
It will take years before the 64-bit address space starts to make sense in portable systems. While workstations for developers have bigger and completely different requirements, in general the most demanding applications for ordinary sixpack-joe are hd-video transcoding (which actually isn't memory intensive), image manipulation (this year's basic $100 models already sport a sensor of 14 megapixels => 45 MB per image layer), and surprisingly web browsing. The ARM equipment support this by providing powerful co-processors and having a tiny (Thumb) instruction set. It's really hard to see where they would need more than 4 GB of RAM.. even according to Moore's law it will take at least 6 years for the top of the line products to use this much memory.
