Pope says that as these components get smarter, they offer an opportunity for Intel with its general purpose chips. How much faster Linux will run on Merced is still an open question. Intel has not released any performance numbers on Linux or any other operating systems being ported. Pope says that until there are real chips to do the testing, that the initial tests don't have much meaning. Chris DiBona says that while speed will be an obvious benefit of the 64-bit architecture, the main benefit will be to address large amounts of memory.
Memory is super important on the server environment.
And that's a problem because 2GB is just not enough. Higher addressable memory is needed, for example, in complex database searches in which long tables of information are joined. That operation could be speeded considerably if it's done in memory. DiBona notes that databases are only getting more complex, particularly with customer information being taken off the Web. I used to do data warehousing work at The Gap, where we would do joins on some enterprise servers and it would take 24 to 48 hours - this is on a machine with 10 terabytes of hard drive space and almost two terabytes of memory.