Some of the work our customers do involve some very large databases. As chip designs grow in size and complexity and customers look toward designing entire systems into a single chip, the modeling and testing requirements are extremely demanding. The more hard data you can hold in memory, the better performance you will have. Sybase has, for instance, used 24GB of memory while publishing a recent TPC-C benchmark. The capacity of a 64-bit environment is critical in multimedia and digital media applications .
More resources yield faster performance.
That is part of the reason we like the Sun environment. We saw good performance increases, although they varied from application to application. Vividata supports over 2,000 printers and over 80 scanners in five major product configurations. The kernel interface portion of the drivers had to be rewritten, but the application level code was a different story. Sun Workshop 5.0 tool's Fortran compilers offer improved performance for compiled code and true 64-bit programming.