[5470] in Release_7.7_team
Fwd: Pondering 64bit systems.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed May 24 15:58:50 2006
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 15:58:32 -0400
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Here is information I shared with the Hardware Core team at last
Friday's meeting.
The team consensus was "Yes, let us bless 64 bit systems this year."
I've been chartered to get an AMD 64 bit HP dx5150 in to confirm that
it works as well as the 32 bit x86 dc5100 systems we bought last year.
-wdc
Begin forwarded message:
> From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
> Date: May 17, 2006 5:17:21 PM EDT
> To: Oliver Thomas <othomas@mit.edu>
> Subject: Pondering 64bit systems.
>
> The question:
> Should we recommend that Linux customers purchase 64 bit desktop
> systems this year?
>
> The short answer:
> Probably yes.
>
> Details:
>
> The question has relevance for the broad IS&T hardware
> recommendations, and to whatever hardware renewal of Linux systems
> is done by Academic Computing this year.
>
> In the past, other uplifts, like the transition of Athena to color,
> to faster CPU's, bigger disks, more memory, even to Linux felt
> pretty obvious to me. I've always felt comfortable leveraging my
> MIT computer engineering degree, my compulsive reading of business
> and computer rags to state, "I think we should do this."
>
> I chatted with Jeff Schiller, the Athena Release Team, Garry
> Zacheiss, and Wilson D'Souza about this.
>
> Greg Hudson asked if there was significant value to going to 64 bit
> systems.
> Jeff asked if there was significant downside to offering the
> "expansion room" of 64 bit systems, given that some use them, and
> more would be expected to.
> Garry pointed out that AMD demonstrated and quickly copied a 64 bit
> solution that had a good price, no 32 bit downside.
> Wilson said that 64 bit use is emerging, and the incremental cost
> is very small.
>
> I believe that next year the answer will be a no-brainer. Everyone
> will be running 64 bit systems on the desktop, and customers will
> have grown accustomed to big datasets, and nasty 3d graphics as
> ordinary use.
>
> A "modern" microprocessor is the AMD Athlon or Intel with EM64T.
>
> Dell is already leading the way by selling stealth 64 bit systems.
> We should probably go ahead and specify HP 64 bit systems this
> year. (Subject to approval by Hardware Services.)
>
> What do you think?
>
> -wdc
>
>
