M Harris wrote:

Although the analogy is going to be a little contrived, its something like the concept of cylinders in an internal combustion engine... there were cars made back in the 30s-50s with 10, 12, and 16 cylinders... but due to harmonics, balance, and other issues (8) seems to be the best (optimum) number of cylinders.

Interesting (I suppose, North-American) view. Here in Europe, most cars have 4 cylinders, some have 6, and 8 is very rare to find. But then, our gas prices are much higher than yours. ;-)

my gut feeling is that 32 bit width is going to be optimum and that 64 bit is the beginning of the end of no returns. I mean if PCs really ever do need to have more than 4gig of real storage/virtual storage then.. .maybe.

There is a reason: virtual machines. The need to have >3GB arises fast if one runs several virtual machines, not only as sub-systems on servers but also on workstations; e.g., as test environments or to have multiple compile/packaging environments, etc. For instance, I have several Windows VMs (2000/XP/Server), Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, FreeBSD, and Solaris 10 VMs on my workstation. Memory is the main constraining factor, as I don't use these VMs all at the same time. They are there to test something in this environment, or to look up difference, or to compile and package some software in its native environment. (Some of them represent customer environments, but that's a different topic.) Also, when one wants to have ONE of these VMs as 64bit, the host system must be 64bit as well. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org