Buzzworthy: 64-bit computing

Overnight success? Hardly. It may have taken 64-bit computing more than ten years to take off but, today, it's flying high.

Over the past decade, IT architects have deployed 64-bit servers for workloads requiring large memory allocations, extreme number-crunching performance, and unquestioned reliability and scalability.

Today, it's not uncommon to find high-end 64-bit servers in the database layer and in high-performance technical computing applications such as 3D solid modeling, geothermal and seismic studies, genetic research, and petroleum exploration. Extreme performance requires high-octane compute power, and organizations are willing pay the price for this "extreme computing."

Over the past 10 years, something else has been happening on the business front. Commodity 32-bit systems, based on the broadly supported x86 instruction set, have driven down business computing costs. Acceptable performance at a favorable price could be achieved with 32-bit systems, making them an attractive alternative for the vast majority of business and personal applications.

That was then. Fast forward to the present, and we can see that a host of new-generation applications — from audio and video encoding and gaming technology, to data modeling, simulations, and vast database management — are pushing the limits of 32-bit computing.