Alan Grimes wrote:
> 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....

Me either. That's why I'm writing this from my dual Opteron server. :)

> 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...

I do think it would be nice if Squeak was at least 64bit clean even if a 
"true" 64bit port didn't advantage significantly. However I would be 
pleased if it did boost performance.

I can't compile Squeak on my machine without dropping down into a 
special 32bit environment for explicit 32bit compiles.

> 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... =\

Oh how I would love that. Take advantage of both my processors.
Woohoo! :)

Jimmie Houchin