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More Details Emerge on AMD's Hammer
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.
Why is it everyone wants AMD to pull some magic processor out of it's pants and to kill of Intel? Intel could start a pricewar at any time and price AMD right out of business with a quickness. True, variety and anti-monopolistic practices are good things, but Intel got to where they are because they did some things right. Some people are pulling for AMD because they are the underdogs, others are doing it because they want to jump on the bandwagon.
Those left, those people that say AMD is undeniably better than Intel in all categories are wrong, Intel and AMD have their own set of advantages and disadvantages over the other.
I am reading a tomshardware.com article on how AMD and Intel's previous and latest processors handle heat. The AMD processors failed horribly, they had zero heat protection. Not only are the processors worthless (burned up or not), but the motherboard could be damaged too. They even used a motherboard that the manufacturer guaranteed wouldn't fry an AthlonXP (a brand new processor). Guess what? In less than a second, you wasted hundreds of dollars. I'll just say that Intel's processors, Pentium 3 and 4, they didn't have any damage. You can read about it on tomshardware.com, there is an article called How Modern Processors Cope With Heat Emergencies, they even published their very first lab video demonstrating exactly what they did here.
AMD can't let things like this occur, they have to give customers something that none of the competition can, they need to innovate. Before AMD has enough weight to kick Intel around, it has to have much more support from it's customers. It'll take more than hopes and dreams to push Intel out of the #1 CPU slot. (pun intended)
The ability to build a desktop workstation with the ability to run all my old x86 crap, fast, and move into 64bit software, also fast, is highly attractive. Athlon or P4 will undoubtably be the choices for the next year, but when AMD gets the Hammer out into the mainstream with a mainstream price, Intel watch out.
Lastly, Microsoft, last I read, didn't indicate any interest in doing a version of XP for the Hammer. Perhaps that hasn't changed. If not, there's a potential hole through which someone may exploit Microsoft's disinterest. Linux, sure, AOL, Hmmm, you know that's a mean fight going on between Reston, VA and Redmond, WA, if the Hammer is attractive to home users, don't be surprise if AOL chooses to support it. It's entertaining to think about, anyway, however you feel about the combatants.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I had to do a review of IA64 and I wanted to know what was AMD's response to Intel 64bit CPU and what was behind the "old" generations.
....
Currently, 2/3 of a CPU is used to analyse/understand/reschedule the code send to the CPU. This part is very important and AMD seams to be better at this game than Intel. The code has to be reschedule so the different parts of the CPU that can work at the same time are efficiently loaded
OK, let stop right now : why isn't the code already efficient ? Because the compiler does NOT care about the inner structure of the CPU so the CPU has to do all the real work.
By keeping with the "good old architecure", AMD is trying to do in hard and in real time what a software (let's say a compiler:)) can do much more easily in a very long time. And a CPU can't see more than a few operations ahead whereas the compiler can see the WHOLE code.
So, by removing all the optimisation crap from the CPU and showing the compiler what's reallly inside, Intel is on the right way. In current CPU, you have more than 40 registers, but you can access only 8 of them and the CPU has to "guess" what could be the best use of them.
So, I think Intel's approch is the right one. Just recompile all your software : to run old stuff, use old hardware.
I have datasheets and documents to comment about this and I would glady do it.
The SPARC and many other RISCs had a "seamless" 32 -> 64 bit transition mostly by doing two things.
There is no reason Intel/AMD couldn't make new 64 bit load and store instructions, and redefine all references to EBX (and the other 3 registers) to be 64 bits. That would work just fine.
The part that would suck is Intel and AMD do not own the OS, or even the bootloaders that runs on their CPUs! MS, and a handful of BIOS makers do. They would have to be convinced it is worth it to do anything.
NOTE: I'm not saying the x86 instruction set is anything close to well designed. It is a shambling horror, but extending it to 64 bits is not really harder then extending the SPARC to 64 bits. In fact if you look at what AMD did it is a pretty easy change (and I think the article is wrong, you can use the new 4 GPRs without having to do any 64 bit stuff, but the OS still needs to be changed to save and load the extra registers).
Intel merely decided the 32 bit to 64 bit change seemed like a good time to try to make a play for the high end market, and to do that with a new instruction set. That might have even been a good idea if they hadn't screwed it up enough that the itanimum earned the nickname the itanic...