Mac OS X Leopard will have 64 bit support from top to bottom, so sometime next year true 64 bit support will be a reality on the Mac platform.
]]>Still, I hate to bet against virtual memory – it can work very well and makes applications less buggy and faster to develop.
]]>But what I am still unclear about is: did the _original_ MacBook Pros support EMT64? I thought they shipped with “Yonah” chips, but given Intel’s decision to name every chip they have as som combination of the word “Core”, “Duo” and optionally the number 2 in random order, I’ve had a little trouble connecting the dots about what parts go where. Give me a 7600GTX any day! 🙂
]]>In my experience processes using 1.5 GB or more can become a problem. If the latter ever becomes a problem, all I need to do is put in some extra memory and then I will be able to have processes allocate their full 2GB.
The problem with virtual memory is that windows manages it poorly. It continuously makes really bad decisions with respect to what to swap to memory leading to very annoying delays when you use e.g. alt tab. Also it affects in game performance because it will be active when the system is stressed to the max. Even with only a quarter of memory in use, my applications get swapped to disk!
So, good decision to rely less on this. You might consider doing some sort of application level virtual memory like for example photoshop does. This would also allow you to work around OS limits and use more than 2GB of disk storage.
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