f-bomb
If any of the fine folks over at Eurocom are reading and would like to send me one of these to play with, I'd be happy to let you all know how Firefox performs on it :-) Please contact me at asa@mozilla.org for shipping information. I think I've even built a decent configuration for less than $6,000 :-)
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
I can't wait to get one of those!
Imagine how great Minesweeper would look... ;-)
Posted by: Mr Lizard | September 22, 2005 11:51 PM
Known as XTreme64 in the UK. Been out for a few months
http://www.rockdirect.com/notebooks/xtreme64_cons.htm
Posted by: me | September 23, 2005 2:46 AM
One strange thing though - top-end graphics card, dual-core 64 bit, but only a maximum of 2GB of RAM?! Is this just because 2GB DDR RAM sticks are scarce or is it an absolute limit? BTW, anyone got the battery life figures for one of these laptops - I bet it's under 2 hours :-) Also, does this machine run Linux? Not a word about it on the site (all the OS options are Windows) - no way would I buy a laptop that wouldn't run Linux...
Posted by: Richard Lloyd | September 23, 2005 2:53 AM
Richard, I have been looking for just that.
Found it on http://www.eurocom.com/products/future/specselectfuture.cfm?model_id=164, 6kg for 1 hour runtime.
Posted by: Axel Hecht | September 23, 2005 3:34 AM
I'd never buy a laptop that costs more than 1000, because I'd probably drop it.
Posted by: ant | September 23, 2005 4:19 AM
1 hour runtime?
Ouch...! 5 hours on my powerbook...
Posted by: Mr Lizard | September 23, 2005 4:52 AM
2 Gb is the maximum value in a 32 bit signed integer, and that's unfortunately a good reason for serious problems to begin above that.
4 Gb will be a big barrier, the final one on all non-64 bits OS.
Posted by: jmdesp | September 23, 2005 6:30 AM
@jmdesp:
Huh?! Can you explain how/why the hardware limitation here is due to a signed integer issue? Windows and Linux certainly aren't limited to 2GB.
Posted by: Remy | September 23, 2005 6:54 AM
It's addressable space. The only reason anyone actually cares about 64-bit processors is that they let people use more ram.
- Chris
Posted by: Chris C | September 23, 2005 7:54 AM
the memory address in 32-bit computers are 32-bit long. Since each bit only hold 0 or 1, therefore, the max number of the memory addresses is 2^32 which is equal to 4294967296 bits = 4 gigbits.
64-bit computers has memory address length of 64-bit; therefore, the max number of memory addresses is 2^64 which is equal to 18446744073709551616 bits = 17,179,869,184 gigabits.
I don't think any computer can have 17 million Gb RAM, but that would nice to have one. :-D
Posted by: GamingFox | September 23, 2005 9:53 AM
Opps, I meant gigabytes, not gigabits. The word on RAM hold 1 bytes, not 1 bit.
Posted by: GamingFox | September 23, 2005 9:55 AM
> The only reason anyone actually cares about 64-bit processors is that they let people use more ram
Get your facts straight! AMD64 aka x86-64 adds 8 extra registers that is quite handy for some computational work. Also some low latency memory access due to integrated memory controller on AMD CPUs.
Posted by: Rat | September 23, 2005 1:23 PM
IIRC, the Intel 64-bit processors and Windows XP 64 only do 40-bit RAM addressing, not 64-bit.
And isn't the whole point of 64-bit CPUs the ability to handle huge numbers natively, not just huge addresses?
Posted by: ant | September 23, 2005 2:01 PM
^
Even AMD64 CPUs only have 40 bits for addressing, not 64-bits.
Also, even Pentium-4 had 36 bits for addressing, not 32-bits.
The main distinction between 32/64 bit is indeed the register size, not address space.
Posted by: vfwlkr | September 23, 2005 7:27 PM