when do you really need a 64bit cpu?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Saturday 02 April 2005 05:12 pm, hanasaki wrote:

> So... I pose this question.  When do you really need a 64bit CPU <other
> than the obvious potential need of a megasever needing the address
> space>?

By which you mean that you have so many Gigabytes of RAM that you are not even 
in the same state as the person writing the checks.

Most of the servers I know of run at less than 20% CPU usage 99% of the time, 
especially web servers.  An application or LTSP server might be different, or 
somethign that had to to a lot of database whacking.

Generally, the problem with a server is that to get the IO performance you 
need you have to MASSIVELY overbuy on other hardware like the CPU.  I would 
imagine that this is true of the 64bit architecture as well - it's not the 
CPU you're buying so much as the data bus.