News.com has an editorial on 64bit platforms and Linux. The introduction is rather interesting:
Unlike most areas of the technology business, 64-bit computing has somehow remained immune to the forces of commodity competition.That's funny, because 64-bitness has been on the horizon for over 10 years now. It was the last frontier back in the early 1990s; everyone with a foundry was working on a 64bit platform back then.
I remember the special issue of CACM dedicated to the Alpha project (1991? 1992?). I remember PCExpo in NYC about 5-8 years ago when DEC or someone was demonstrating the drastic differences between running a massive database search on a Pentium vs. an Alpha.
Yet something happened on the way from there to here. About the only 64bit platform of note today is the UltraSparc, with Itanium/x86-64 making lots of heat but no light. With all the talk about the need to move to 64bits, and about a decade to make the move, it's surprising how uncommon 64bit platforms are today.
(I won't comment on the rest of the editorial; it misstates a lot of details and is a little too bullish on Linux. The author is the CEO of SuSE, so his biases are to be expected.)
