Linked by Jeremy T. Fox on Fri 11th Jul 2003 16:55 UTC
A recent article by Tony Smith from The Register titled "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther will not be a 64-bit OS" caused a good deal of confusion with many people, including me. It is also caused a heated argument here on OSNews. The basic point of the article is that Mac OS 10.2.7 and 10.3 are not "true" 64-bit OSes, but the article does not clearly explain what a "true" 64-bit OS is. This had led to a lot of claims that the article is false or misinformed, rather than just unclear, which is certainly is.
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"If you want a 64-bit OS on the desktop, use the appropriate versions of Windows or Linux on an Itanium or AMD64 (Opteron, Athlon64) machine."
...in which case, you will still be running 32-bit applications under unless they've been recompiled, or you're compiling it yourself.
From what I'm reading, G5 programs can be compiled to use PowerPC64 instructions but retain 32-bit addressing and object modes. Is it disappointing that they won't do true 64-bit addressing in OS X 10.3? Sure. But what makes a CPU "X-bit" is not the amount of memory it can address without using segments. If address lines were what this was judged by, we would be talking about the PPC970 as a 42-bit processor--and even more absurdly, we would be talking about Apple IIs, TRS-80s and Commodore 64's as 16-bit computers, not 8-bit, since they could all address 64K of contiguous memory (instead of the 256 bytes 8-bit addressing would allow).