OpenEuphoria

Re: 64 bit Eu?

• Posted by "mic _" <stabmaster_ at hotmail.com> Nov 24, 2003
• 428 views

>  1.  Will you support the AMD 64bit cpu, or the Intell
>64 bit cpu, or both?

These are *totally* different. The IA-64 (Itanium) is not binary compatible 
with IA-32 (x86) and requires an emulator to run x86 executables. Of course, 
if you have a compiler for the Itanium you could recompile the whole thing 
and have a separate distribution. The amount of home users with Itanium 
processor is probably very low atm though. The Athlon64 is just an extension 
of the x86. It has legacy modes to run old code, and a new 64-bit mode with 
twice as many general registers (all 64-bit), twice as many MMX registers, 
among other things.


>  2. Since the Linux operating system and GNU
>development tools are essentially free will you port
>Eu to 64 bit Linux first?

Would be cheaper at least  : )


>  3. Will a 64 bit implementation of Eu run twice as
>fast as 32bit?  If not, how much of a performance
>increase would you anticipate or hope to realize?

Twice as fast? No.  How much faster? I dunno..
As i said, the Athlon64 has twice as many general registers, which can help 
if you have compiler designed for it. It also has the HyperTransport or 
whatever AMD calls it (higher memory bandwidth basically).


>  4. Beyond any improvements in "speed" what other
>advantages might a 64 bit implementation of Eu have
>over 32 bit Eu?

Beats me. True 32-bit integers? That'd probably cause too much confusion 
though, since it would differ from "32-bit Euphoria".