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

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Lionel Peterson wrote:

>
> --- Kevin <kevin at mpcf.com> 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.
>
> I think this is mainly a RISC vs. CISC point, not that the Alpha chip
> is that much worse than other RISC chips...
>
> Also, Alpha was *always* 64 bit, even when other RISC chips were still
> 32 bit, and the larger instruction size led to larger executables...

Alpha instructions are 32bits, native data paths are 64 bits. RISC code
tends to be larger that is true, but mainly due to the fact that a CISC instruction is
usually equal to a few RISC instructions. CISC made sense in a time when
memory was very expensive :).