2, 4, 8, 16, 32.....
64!
I have been telling IT Pros in my audience for about 2.5 years now that I gave 32 bit CPU's about a 5 yr life span. I predicted that by 2010, all consumer PC's would be 64 bit and consumers would have multi-terabyte storage capabilities and 8 gigs plus of RAM standard. I still think all of this will happen but it just might happen sooner than I thought.
I just read two interesting posts on the shift to 64-bit. The first on the Windows Vista Team Blog, and the other by Ed Bott over at ZDNet. It seems there has been a rapid shift to 64-bit in the past 3-6 months. Both of my work laptops are running 64 bit Vista/2008 and have for almost a year. I also have four 64 bit servers at home. I still have some 32 bit servers and they will hang around until the MoBo's burn up or the drives die like I usually let them do. My wife's tablet is also 32 bit, but I don't plan on buying anything but 64 bit going forward and I would recommend the same to my friends and family.
The Vista Blog and Ed give their reasons for the shift and even make recommendations for who should go 64 bit and why. I agree with most of their reasons but I have a few selfish reasons of my own for pushing all 64 bit.
1) Unify the hardware architecture. If consumers and businesses just stop buying 32 bit hardware and go with 64 bit, Intel and AMD will be able to stop producing and supporting those lines, ramp up the 64 bit lines and start investing in 128 bit or whatever they will come up with next. No sense being constrained to 3 or 4 gigs of RAM when it already isn't sufficient for what we do and will do in just a couple of years. Not to mention the additional difficulty for administrators having to maintain 32 and 64 bit hardware platforms and the 32 and 64 bit versions of the software to go with them. Get back to a single "bit" platform and simplify administration. Besides, the less information I have to remember regarding licensing differences and hardware requirements between 32 and 64 bit versions of our software the better.
2) Memory, Memory, Memory. With all due respect to developers out there (and I don't care if you work for a huge company or you are solo) the bloat in software over the years has forced us to consume more and more hardware resources. The rapid ramp up of CPU clock speeds in the 90's allowed developers to rely on the speed of the hardware to make up for the inefficiency of the coding. We will see the same thing happen with massive multi-core systems I am sure. It wasn't all that long ago that all we needed was 2-4 megabytes of RAM to run the O/S and the apps. Now we need DVD storage capabilities and gigabytes of RAM just to get an OS loaded. Yeah, yeah, yeah.....all the cool things we can do now with 3D graphics, streaming media, HD quality programming, they actually do require more resources to process the massive amounts of data required to make those things functions. But how fast does a word processor have to be? An Excel spreadsheet? Reading email? Sending a Tweet? There is a LOT of wasted processing power out there and I blame the developers for not working to make better use of it. I joke that coding these days consists of typing a couple letters, waiting for the correct word to auto-fill, then pressing the tab key until the line of code turns green and I am not too far off. But that simplicity of coding means layers of abstraction and translation that simplify coding greatly with a sacrifice in run time efficiency.
Oh yeah....I am supposed to be making a point. I doubt developers and dev tools will get more efficient so that means we need the extra memory to accommodate the huge apps they are going to throw at us. Going 64 bit allows that to happen. Any predictions on whether we will see consumer devices with terabytes of memory in our lifetimes?
3) Make it Mobile. Where is my super fast, oodles of memory mobile PC/Phone that doesn't pause or freeze up all together when switching functions!?!?!? All this super fast tech has gotten dumped into desktops and laptops but not phones. If you have a "phone" that doubles as a mobile computing platform, you have likely suffered those pauses and freezes which taint the whole mobile phone/PC experience. We have asked our phones to do more than the hardware will allow for up to this point and the faster we move the PC world forward the faster the mobile world will come along. I want a phone that responds like a PC, is as stable as a PC, is as useful as a PC and has a battery that last for weeks on end without needing to be recharged (okay....that last one is a stretch). Seriously, get some of the hardware advances miniaturized already, resolve the power issues, and make them really useful.
My Dream Phone - Quad-Core 64 bit 4ghz Windows Mobile Phone with 64 gigs of RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth, built-in Sirius satellite radio receiver, 16 GB dedicated video memory to power the 200' 3D holographic projector that makes an IMAX looks wimpy, active noise canceling technology for phone and ear-bud listening, 30 mega-pixel camera, and optional light saber attachment.
Cheers!
