Jimmie Houchin wrote:
[Itanium]

> Is there no benefit performance-wise for a native 64bit port?
> Naive question, I don't know.


In theory,
But then I don't see many people rushing out to spend $1,500 on a 700 
mhz chip....

Since many machines already and, apparently, many more will be using 
AMD64, I don't see any reason to put any special effort into the Itanic 
[sic]. Whatever is done for other platforms will automagicly work. GCC 
will compile code that uses "int64" on any platform wheather it be the 
64 bit G5 or my dual athlon...

The issue I see with going 64 is that we tend to waste more and more 
bits of hardware level pointers... Squeak hardly needs even 26 bits to 
do it's normal stuff...

The first real advantage to 64 bit is that you don't have to fall back 
to software to do long math... Overflows become much less common. Squeak 
is very powerful. Because it is an OO system we could stick with the 
same opcodes but simply make them 64-bit aware or we could add new 
ones... There are pros and cons to both approaches.

The major improvment that I'm trying to work towards is SMP/SMT support. 
Squeak today is strictly single threaded... =\