I got to play with an Itanium 2 Box at the PDC today. Instead of following their script, I did what I’ve wanted to do for months…creating a huge DataSet. They had an interesting setup. You used a Pentium 4 box to develop code and then Terminal Service’d into a sixteen-way Itanium 2 machine to run the code. The 64 bit JIT’s the IL to 64 bit code from the same assembly that the 32 bit JIT did to create the 32 bit code.

I say some interesting results:

• Created a 1 Gig DataSet on the Pentium 4 machine. Worked fine.
• Running the same test on the Itanium 2 worked just fine, faster but fine.
• Created a 3 Gig DataSet on the Pentium 4 machine caused OutOfMemoryExceptions. That’s what I expected.
• On the Itanium 2 machine it worked!

With some encouragement by the Microsoft staff, we tested 4, 8 and 16 gig DataSets. Wahoo…it worked fine. There was a small problem with some internal issues with multiple threads and the DataSet, but that’s to be expected. The 64 bit CLR is still pretty early on.

What really impressed me was how seemless the two worlds were. The only thing I really did that was specific to the 64 bit code, we to use UInt64’s for some memory counters, but that was to be sure that I didn’t overflow the numbers.

I really want to try this stuff on an AMD 64…maybe tomorrow!

Till tomorrow…