Intel unveils a new architecture for 2019: Sunny Cove

arstechnica.com

18 pointsibobev3 comments

Sunny Cove extends virtual addresses to 57 meaningful bits...The new limits enable 128PB of virtual address space and 4PB of physical memory.

This is interesting to me. At first glance I couldn’t really figure out “why now”. But I guess with Optane there really will be a need for addressing petabytes of ram, as it will span DRAM and Optane. It seems Intel thinks it will be a competitive advantage.

I wonder about the bincompat of such a change. "32-bit clean" all over again?

X64 was designed with this in mind. All non-active bits must be the same value (a so called canonical address) or the processor will fault. You can’t use them for flag bits unless you make sure to clear them before dereferencing memory.

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