Datacenters have a lot of stuff running in them. Big servers and databases arn't just for public facing large scale applications.
Database servers in particular wants as much memory as possible, and it doesn't take that big of a business support application that have a working set of data > 4Gb.
Same goes for a lot of the memory hungry Java application servers that sits around in a lot of businesses.
Apparently we're crossing wires here. I'm in no way shape or form saying these applications don't exist (I'm currently writing one).
What I am saying is that for ever such application there are probably more than a thousand sites hosted on free with your domain or $5 a month php + mysql hosting that use no where near 4GB per process. For the companies hosting those sites a cortex a-15 with a ton of ram is an awesome solution. This isn't all or nothing, we're talking about two different markets.
It doesn't, and I don't see where I've made that claim. I'm refuting the opposite. The initial claim was:
> I didn't explicitly call that out, but as soon as you have more than 4GB of memory, there's going to be an application that wants to use more than 4GB. So yes, 64-bit is necessary in my opinion. Especially when you consider the server market.
I'm just saying I don't agree. There is a massive market very open to the power saving offered by arm that have no use for > 4GB process spaces. That doesn't mean there aren't markets where 64bit will be useful.
I think we are on different pages with the word "necessary". I am using it as "needs to exist as an option", and I think you're using it as, "needs to be used by everyone".
Database servers in particular wants as much memory as possible, and it doesn't take that big of a business support application that have a working set of data > 4Gb.
Same goes for a lot of the memory hungry Java application servers that sits around in a lot of businesses.