Itanium Update

NegaMaxAlphaBeta writes: "For those of you interested in Intel's Itanium 64 bit processor, EETimes has a nice update article to let us know what's happening with this beast. With an 8 stage pipeline, as opposed to the 20 stage pipeline in the P4, clock frequencies are obviously not as high (~1 GHz). Other notable numbers extracted from the article: 130 Watts power consumption, 328 registers, 6 MB of onchip L3 cache ... quite nice (well, not the power thing). I'm sure many people can appreciate 64 bit integer ops; for me, it means single instruction xor for the 64 bit hash codes used in chess transposition tables."

Comments

Think of the acronym possibilities

[vanguard]

This is cool. It's like SMP on a chip. Guess we'll call it SUP (Symmetric Uni Processing) .

At work I'll be running WUSUP (Windows Under Symmetric Uni Processing). Of course, I'll pronounce it Waaazzzzzup. :-)

G4 kicks butt.

[gowmc]

Half the people here are excited about 64 bits. Some people think that 32 is fine.
If 32 bits is in the GameBoy advance (http://www.gameboyadvance.com/system/index.html), why would it be good enough for a computer?

If 64 bits is in the Nintendo 64, why would even THAT be good enough for a new processor?

If 128 bits is in the Dreamcast, why would you buy a computer with less bits?

This is where I am happy to be one of the few people who can say, that their computer has more bits than the Itanium processor. Sure my computer is a few years old, but is still going fast at 400Mhz. That's the beauty of the G4. They are still fast, even when they are 2 years old and only 1/4 the speed of the fastest top of the line G4. If you don't believe me, check this out: http://www.apple.com/g4