I found this a rather interesting post by Linus:
<A HREF="http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&PostNum=2229&Thread=9&entryID=30176&roomID=11" target="_new">Realworldtech</A>
A quote:
Hmmm.. sounds awfull lot like what I've been preaching here, If you read the rest of his post, you'll get some excellent technical arguments by the father of linux. Eden are you reading ?

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =
<A HREF="http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&PostNum=2229&Thread=9&entryID=30176&roomID=11" target="_new">Realworldtech</A>
A quote:
The virtual address space needs to be at least an
order of magnitude bigger than the physical address space,
and in many cases you want it to be _many_ orders of
magnitude bigger.
This is also the reason why the Intels old argument that
"We don't need more than 4GB of RAM on the desktop for
a few years" was so totally bogus. The same way a 32-bit
virtual address space has _nothing_ to do with 4GB of
physical memory, a 64-bit virtual address space has very
little indeed to do with 2**64 bytes of physical RAM.
Basically, if your physical memory size is even _close_
to the size of your virtual address size span, you're in
trouble. For example, a 32-bit virtual memory limitation
starts getting painful not at 4GB of RAM, but at about
512 MB.
Hmmm.. sounds awfull lot like what I've been preaching here, If you read the rest of his post, you'll get some excellent technical arguments by the father of linux. Eden are you reading ?

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =