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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 AMD making these things so sensitive to heat? I'll bet they're also sensitive to vibration, electricity, and about anything that its competitors handle every day. Most hammers can resist hundreds of degrees before they melt/disentigrate.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Even before the processor is out, NetBSD already runs on it. See here
Itanium can run un-modified x86 and in certain cases PA-RISC binaries unmodified. Look at the specs, there was no clean break. Intel learned with the i960 and the 8080 that clean breaks are not liked by those designing the systems at all. The x86 stayed around and will continue to stay around for as long as Intel stays around. Intel will have nothing else.
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
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?
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
Buy a heatsink, you cheap bastard, and install 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...