Posted by
michael
on from the double-the-pleasure-double-the-fun dept.
msolnik writes: "Over at RealWorldTech they've published an article on the future of 64-bit performance. This article covers the different technology from Sparc to Hammer. Its a great read if you are looking for information on up-and-coming products from Intel, AMD, Sun, and Compaq."
link to Full article
by
mESSDan
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
is here: That way you only have to wait a longass time for it to load once, instead of a longass time for each of the 5 or 6 pages.
--
-- Dan
Re:So why do I need 64bits?
by
4im
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
One word: addressing. With those 32 bits,
you can
typically address up to 2 gig files on your
machine - which is a limit easily encountered when
you start working with video, for instance.
It took hacks to get 4 gig of RAM working on x86
with the linux kernel.
Go 64 bit, and that limit vanishes. You keep your
linear addressing, none of those ugly segments like
in the unfamous real-mode of PC-XT times.
I don't see what's really new about it all though,
we've had 64 bit since Alpha, and there's several
64 bit architectures around. It may not be
mainstream yet, but will IA 64 or Hammer really
change that (soon)? Allow me to have doubts.
Now we can wait for software support...
by
green+pizza
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Once we get the 64-bit hardware, we still have the MMOS (minor matter of software) to worry about.
Cases in point:
Silicon Graphics machines with MIPS R4400 (and up) CPUs were 64-bit, but the additional address and pointer space wern't utilized until IRIX 6.0 in 1994 -- over 18 months later. (And, of course, certain SGIs still run in 32-bit mode due to RAM concerns -- 64-bit requires more RAM -- all Indys, all Indigos, all O2s, and R4400 Indigo2s).
Sun machines with UltraSPARC CPUs were 64-bit, but again, the additional address and pointer space had to wait for software support. (Multi-stage transition to 64-bit, starting with Solaris 2.5 and finally complete with Solaris 7 in 1998).
Then there's application optimization. Many apps can get slight speedups by processing data in larger (say, 38-bit or even 64-bit chunks). Sometimes the difference is huge, many times it's small. But, lots of little speedups can add up across an entire system. Still, someone has to make these changes to apps and compilers. It takes time, testing, and adoption. In better times, SGI did several such overhauls... they got some insane speed out of Netscape Enterprise and Netscape FastTrack web servers during the Everest project. One of their engineers also did some cool (but nonstandard) hacks to Apache, including the very first pure, clean 64-bit port/mod.
Newer, faster, wider, more-torque hardware is always great. But don't forget the software.
Re:Shrinkage
by
CaptainAlbert
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
> Perhaps your 486 MB was the first of its kind,
> but modern motherboards with integrated devices
> have the ability to disable them so that can be
> replaced by cards in slots.
True, but that presupposes the existence of spare slots;-)
I hear what you're saying about trashable chips, but I think the real phenomenon is the "trashable board". Think about it - if your mobo dies and your warrantee has run out, you go buy a replacement and ditch the old board. If it happens still to be under its manufacturer's warrantee, most likely you just take it back to the shop and swap it for a working one. What happens to the old one? Most likely, they throw it away. The cost of postage, packing, an engineer's time to find the problem, repairs, parts... it's more than the damn thing retails for anyway.
I think this is missing the point anyway. The integration idea goes like this: with today's technology, you could put the equivalent of an early Pentium processor, plus hard disk and graphics controllers, BIOS chipset, etc. onto a single piece of silicon. Pretty much all you'd be left with off-chip would be (a) RAM and (b) I/O circuitry, because they're both harder to integrate. So your computer is about four or five chips. This is approximately the case in palm-tops now.
The point is that you've lost all ability to choose your own components. That graphics block/macrocell has probably been chosen by the manufacturer becuase it was the best value for money (i.e. the cheapest they could find). If you're lucky, they will give you expansion ports so you can plug your own stuff in. But that costs money, and if they think you'll pay for the lesser product then they'll make that instead.
Does it matter? Probably not to the average user. But I think it would matter to the industry. The whole point of having standard architectures like PCI, SCSI, EIDE (and before them, ISA et al.) is that many vendors can compete to produce compatible products, which drives innovation and generally provides a good deal for the consumer.
But if the minimisation continues and the busses become subsumed into the very chips themselves, then the chances are the manufacturers will cut corners. They won't wait for the not-quite-standard-yet SuperBus2005 architecture... they'll design their own and make you buy their proprietary upgrades. Again, the economics work out such that you the consumer probably get a good deal. But trading off good deals today against innovation tomorrow is dangerous.
So, it would be much better to keep all those busses outside the individual components, right? But that's exactly what is keeping the PC architecture slow at the moment (which was the point of my previous post. I think.).
Slashdot Mirror
is here: That way you only have to wait a longass time for it to load once, instead of a longass time for each of the 5 or 6 pages.
-- Dan
One word: addressing. With those 32 bits, you can typically address up to 2 gig files on your machine - which is a limit easily encountered when you start working with video, for instance.
It took hacks to get 4 gig of RAM working on x86 with the linux kernel.
Go 64 bit, and that limit vanishes. You keep your linear addressing, none of those ugly segments like in the unfamous real-mode of PC-XT times.
I don't see what's really new about it all though, we've had 64 bit since Alpha, and there's several 64 bit architectures around. It may not be mainstream yet, but will IA 64 or Hammer really change that (soon)? Allow me to have doubts.
Once we get the 64-bit hardware, we still have the MMOS (minor matter of software) to worry about.
Cases in point:
Silicon Graphics machines with MIPS R4400 (and up) CPUs were 64-bit, but the additional address and pointer space wern't utilized until IRIX 6.0 in 1994 -- over 18 months later. (And, of course, certain SGIs still run in 32-bit mode due to RAM concerns -- 64-bit requires more RAM -- all Indys, all Indigos, all O2s, and R4400 Indigo2s).
Sun machines with UltraSPARC CPUs were 64-bit, but again, the additional address and pointer space had to wait for software support. (Multi-stage transition to 64-bit, starting with Solaris 2.5 and finally complete with Solaris 7 in 1998).
Then there's application optimization. Many apps can get slight speedups by processing data in larger (say, 38-bit or even 64-bit chunks). Sometimes the difference is huge, many times it's small. But, lots of little speedups can add up across an entire system. Still, someone has to make these changes to apps and compilers. It takes time, testing, and adoption. In better times, SGI did several such overhauls... they got some insane speed out of Netscape Enterprise and Netscape FastTrack web servers during the Everest project. One of their engineers also did some cool (but nonstandard) hacks to Apache, including the very first pure, clean 64-bit port/mod.
Newer, faster, wider, more-torque hardware is always great. But don't forget the software.
> Perhaps your 486 MB was the first of its kind,
;-)
> but modern motherboards with integrated devices
> have the ability to disable them so that can be
> replaced by cards in slots.
True, but that presupposes the existence of spare slots
I hear what you're saying about trashable chips, but I think the real phenomenon is the "trashable board". Think about it - if your mobo dies and your warrantee has run out, you go buy a replacement and ditch the old board. If it happens still to be under its manufacturer's warrantee, most likely you just take it back to the shop and swap it for a working one. What happens to the old one? Most likely, they throw it away. The cost of postage, packing, an engineer's time to find the problem, repairs, parts... it's more than the damn thing retails for anyway.
I think this is missing the point anyway. The integration idea goes like this: with today's technology, you could put the equivalent of an early Pentium processor, plus hard disk and graphics controllers, BIOS chipset, etc. onto a single piece of silicon. Pretty much all you'd be left with off-chip would be (a) RAM and (b) I/O circuitry, because they're both harder to integrate. So your computer is about four or five chips. This is approximately the case in palm-tops now.
The point is that you've lost all ability to choose your own components. That graphics block/macrocell has probably been chosen by the manufacturer becuase it was the best value for money (i.e. the cheapest they could find). If you're lucky, they will give you expansion ports so you can plug your own stuff in. But that costs money, and if they think you'll pay for the lesser product then they'll make that instead.
Does it matter? Probably not to the average user. But I think it would matter to the industry. The whole point of having standard architectures like PCI, SCSI, EIDE (and before them, ISA et al.) is that many vendors can compete to produce compatible products, which drives innovation and generally provides a good deal for the consumer.
But if the minimisation continues and the busses become subsumed into the very chips themselves, then the chances are the manufacturers will cut corners. They won't wait for the not-quite-standard-yet SuperBus2005 architecture... they'll design their own and make you buy their proprietary upgrades. Again, the economics work out such that you the consumer probably get a good deal. But trading off good deals today against innovation tomorrow is dangerous.
So, it would be much better to keep all those busses outside the individual components, right? But that's exactly what is keeping the PC architecture slow at the moment (which was the point of my previous post. I think.).
I could go on and on... <looks up> oh, wait...
These sigs are more interesting tha