3 ms·

You might not need 16GB of memory. There are systems where int is only 16 bits, and overflowing 16 bits is not that difficult. But maybe it was uncommon to ha

You might not need 16GB of memory. There are systems where int is only 16 bits, and overflowing 16 bits is not that difficult. But maybe it was uncommon to have arrays larger than 64K in the 80s due to segmented memory?

PaulKeeble 2y ago
The core of Java was being written in the late 1990s. I had a machine in 1995 that had 16MB of memory but 8MB was more typical for Pentium machines. By 2000 the AMD Athlon and Pentium 3 were the latest and greatest and Anandtech was testing with 128MB of memory [1]. Java defines an int as 32 signed, it doesn't do anything else it calls 16 bit ints shorts. So it definitely has to be 8GB for the array. Sun was using Solaris machines rather than PCs and they were higher spec on things like memory but still I doubt they had 2GB let alone 8GB+ needed to run this test. That sort of memory didn't become routine for another decade where Sandy Bridge was being tested with 8GB in 2011 [2]. Also goes to show how much things have stagnated, a desktop computer with 16GB has been standard for a long time. The preceding decade we went from 128MB to 8GB as normal and the next 15 years to today normal is 16-32GB which is no where near the same place of progress of memory density. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/566/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/566/6 [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/14 https://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-...