Thursday September 30, 2004 AMD64, not only about the coolness factor!
Hey, go ahead and have a look at my desktop. Yeah, click on the thumbnail. It looks just like any other desktop on Solaris these days. I'm running KDE, KMail, Firefox 1.0 Preview, GIMP 2.0.2, and I'm VPN'd into the SWAN using IPsec. This is after all my home machine. Oh, but there is one other minor difference about this desktop, please have a gander at the Konsole terminal which is displaying the output of isainfo -v. Yeah, it's running the AMD64 Solaris kernel.
At first thought this doesn't seem like a breakthrough in technology, there are other 64-bit kernels that already exist in today's world, in fact we have one for Solaris that runs on 64-bit SPARC processors, so at Sun Microsystems this is certainly not any big breakthrough.
However, this is a slight breakthrough in the x86 commodity hardware space, because while I have a 64-bit kernel for Solaris on AMD64 Opteron, I can still run all of my 32-bit applications that exist in today's 32-bit Solaris on x86.
While there's a certain amount of coolness factor in running 64-bit apps on a 64-bit kernel, it's much more cool in today's world to be able to run your existing 32-bit applications without change, IMO. It just seems that one of the big lessons we've learned over the past 20 years in the microcomputer world is that backward compatibility is key to moving technology forward. Looking at the cases where technology didn't take backward compatibility into account, the chipsets had a hard time in the market, and in most cases have "died on the vine" so to speak.
It seems to me that by being able to accomplish this, we open a new door for customers and in many ways can "Win Friends and Influence People". I know that I have started to learn a great deal by reading Dale Carnegie's book, as stated below in my blog...but I think Sun has as well. Sun's committment to Solaris on the x86 architecture has never been stronger, and I'm looking forward to seeing us make a lot of new friends. Solaris 10 is definitely going to have a big influence on many people, if you don't believe me, just go ahead and try it. Have a look at the Solaris Express Webpage where you can download a version of Solaris 10 that will run on either SPARC or x86 architectures. Before you know it you'll be able to have those same features running on a true 64-bit kernel with the ability to run all of your existing 32-bit applications as well.
Sure, it's not only about the coolness factor. But this is so cool to me, I thought winter was here already!;-)
( Sep 30 2004, 11:08:30 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [6]
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Clear and succinct explanation of a very cool feature. It's so lost in the media that I'd almost forgotten about what it had taken to get there.
Thank you for reminding us about the importance of backward compatibility again, specially as the world gradually crosses the chasm between 32 and 64 bit computing.
Posted by M. Mortazavi on October 01, 2004 at 02:33 AM PDT #
Posted by Yusuf Goolamabbas on October 01, 2004 at 03:24 AM PDT #
Posted by justin on October 09, 2004 at 01:20 PM PDT #
Justin,
The only reason my desktop was blocky was the fonts being used in KMail when the snapshot was taken, I believe. Yes, anti-aliasing is turned on in the Control Panel.
<img src="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/aland/64-bit-desktop2_thumb.jpg" />
I've taken another snapshot for you. Notice that I'm playing a CD in XMMS and at the same time I'm playing a Quicktime movie in mplayer, audio works fine through the kernel mixer! The audio sounds great to me as well!;-)
Keep in mind that this is KDE 3.1.1, and as I type the Sun engineer who works on the Companion CD is almost done with KDE 3.3 using QT 3.3.3, so that should look nicer. I don't find the fonts blocky or hard to read myself. Make sure your browser is not scaling the image down to fit in your browser window.
Posted by Alan DuBoff on October 09, 2004 at 05:40 PM PDT #
Posted by justin on October 10, 2004 at 03:12 PM PDT #
Justin,
Not real sure, the first shot was taken just after getting the 64-bit stuff going with KDE, and the second one I took was a couple days ago.
I'll post another piece to my blog about the audio, I think other people want to know which devices are supported as well. I'm using the onboard Tyan 2885 audio, which is an AMD 8111 chipset, works fine on both 32-bit and 64-bit. As you might know, when running the 64-bit kernel you need 64-bit device drivers.
Posted by Alan DuBoff on October 10, 2004 at 10:32 PM PDT #