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More Details Emerge on AMD's Hammer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the yet-more-data dept.

Diabolus writes "Anandtech have more information on AMD's upcoming Hammer processors. " Talking with several engineers who are in the know about it, the Hammer looks pretty frickin' amazing. Itanium will have a run for its money, I suspect.

4 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Hammer will rock! by Glock27 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Linux has already been ported to the simulator, and supports 511 GB of memory per process. That should do for a start!

    Each feature of the Hammer taken alone is evolutionary, but the overall effect should be revolutionary (at least with regard to Intel server market share;).

    AMD stock is looking like quite a bargain at around $10/share... :-)

    299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

    --
    Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
    Score: -1 100% Flamebait
  2. Re:Wise Intel by mmontour · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't you think that we've hauled along the old 8086/XT baggage long enough? Do we really need a 64-bit 2GHz processor that can still run an MS-DOS 1.0 executable file, or that needs a multi-stage boot loader to crawl its way up the evolutionary ladder from 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit "mode", accompanied by a BIOS that has 6 different ways to map a 400G hard-drive into a 1024x16x63 parameter space?

    I feel that at some point the best thing to do is walk away from the old architecture and make a fresh start with a new one. Commodore did this when they went from the C-64 to the Amiga. Users grumbled for a while, but I think that in hindsight it turned out to be the right choice - once people began to exploit the capabilities of the new platform, compatibility with the old one became irrelevant. And there's always software emulation for those cases when you really do need to preserve the old stuff.

    Note that I don't actually know how much "legacy" x86 code is in the Hammer, but even the article's little picture of the register structure makes be think the answer is "too much". Anyway, when did a lack of factual knowledge ever stop someone from ranting on Slashdot? :-)

  3. Re:Backwards compatability big advantage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The big iron is where the money is. Intel has the means to compete at the low end for quite some time, while increasing market share at the top. AMD will not get into the back office like Intel and will be consigned to making its living off of smaller and smaller margins.

  4. Re:AMD's Future by connorbd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's not that they're sensitive to heat per se; they just lack the safeguards Intel chips have. It's all on board on the P4, for example.

    /Brian