On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 23:49 +0200, Mattias Wadenstein wrote: > On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > > > On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 04:09:59PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: [snip] > Ehm. There is no 64-bit version of the POWER ISA, it was > extended/fixed/replaced by the PowerPC ISA which was designed with 32 and > 64 bit implementations to begin with (I think). POWER3 is a ppc64 > implementation selling under the POWER brand, not a 64-bit POWER > implementation. > > Before the POWER3 (and other ppc64 implementations), the SMP rs6000 > machines where 32-bit ppcs and had address limitations which meant that > the maximum ammount of memory supported was around 3-3.5 gigs. This is in > place even for the ppc smp sp2 node called "silver", which I happen to run > a couple of for ftp.se.debian.org. These were the high-end computational > resources that were replaced by the POWER3, and couldn't handle more that > 4 gigs of ram. > > The IBM sales manuals are around and pretty good at telling you exactly > what hardware combinations are/were supported, I think you'll notice that > the support for more than 4GB came at the launch of the POWER3 (or the > RS64(?) chip, another ppc64 implementation used by ibm for the commercial > computing segment rather than technical computing). Well, I guess that answers the original question regarding whether POWER32 could handle more than 4GB... -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson, LA USA PGP Key ID 8834C06B "He was about as useful in a crisis as a sheep." Dorothy Eden
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