On Sat, 21 Mar 2015 04:17:02 PM Rick Moen wrote:
Back when x86_64 was new (and was AMD64, technically), my recollection was that we heard about the glorious new 16 exabyte (2^64) _theoretical_ linear address space that for reasons of practicality would be limited to 256 terabytes (2^48). Yet, we've never seen that, right? Mind you, I'm not talking about machines shipping _with_ 256 terabytes of RAM, only ones that could address that amount if it were available in real-world hardware.
It's not even necessarily down to the motherboards, even the CPUs have RAM limitations, from what I've seen -EP series CPUs don't go beyond 768GB of RAM so our 1TB and larger systems are all Westmere-EX based systems (they predate the Ivybridge-EX CPUs). Similarly the current Haswell-EP's have the same limitation, you'll need to wait for the -EX series ones to ship to get to TB's of RAM... cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC