[geeks] Itanium 32 bit performace.... hahahaha

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Kevin wrote:

>
> I've heard this before, but have never understood it.  What is it
> about Alphas that requires more RAM than other processors?  My Alpha
> has 256 and seems to run fine as a file server.

Alphas before the 21164A were not byte addressable, meaing that you were
wasting a lot of memory if you just needed to store a byte, since
depending on the compiler/OS you may be wasting a full word (the original
design called for a KISS approach). It made the chip very simple, since
you do not have to deal with unaligned aceesses, and of course cache is
far simplified. I.e. no need to decode a large offset for a cache line.