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Intel's Answer to AMD's Hammer - Yamhill
bdolan writes: "Today's San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Intel is going to put a 64 bit architecture extension in upcoming Pentiums if it turns out the Itanium doesn't take off. Hmm. Apparently they intend to only turn this on if AMD's 64 bit processor make major inroads against the Itanium architecture. Aren't we glad that competition is keeping everyone on their toes."
It seems your trying to draw a parallel here to the MS case. That is not entirely possible in this instance.
There is one critical difference: it's possible to clone an x86 processor. They are standard and well documented.
You can't clone Windows. It is only partially open, with closed file formats and APIs all over the place. Open APIs are often not documented well, or may have undocumented bugs which applications depend on.
It is possible to make a chip that will run all the same applications as Intel's, and to do so in a reasonable timeframe. However, Wine and LindowsOS are clear counterpoints to that, showing that that CANNOT be done with an OS.
For those who care, Yamhill is a small town WSW of Portland (the little red star at the lower left).
Fascinating info can be found at cityofyamhill.com, naturally.
There actually is a basis for this name. Intel has a large presence in the state of Oregon and has a tendency to give their products code names from that state.
For example, there's the Willamette (a major river, incidentally one of only a handful in the world that run south to north), the Klamath (a county) and the Deschutes (another county and also a national forrest).
There may be others, but they don't come to mind at the moment.
As a former Oregonian, I find this kind of cool...
Best regards,
David
Expect it to look a lot like AMD's x86-64 architecture, although it will probably be gratuitously incompatible.
Why do people insist on wasting their moderation points on "funny" comments?!
The chip is code named Prescott. From the article:
The Yamhill features are being built into the next version of Intel's Pentium chip, code-named Prescott, with an option to turn the features on or off. In 2003 or 2004, when the Prescott chip is expected to be available, Intel will evaluate AMD's offerings and the success of the Itanium and then decide whether to activate the Yamhill code.
There you have it.
I'm a 2000 man.
IBM's p690 does put 2 processors on a chip.
But you don't need 2 processors for multiprocessing. "Barrel processors" had one core with multiple contexts (register sets). The contexts would use the execution unit in round-robin fashion. Barrel processors were controlling I/O, where mainframes needed parallelism but not speed. I think CDC PP's and Amdahl channels used them.
That's how the free market works: products that are ready for primetime, products that consumers wants, products that offer a price point, will sell.
Products that are before their time, or cost too much, or don't perform any differently than others (in the consumers' eyes) will not sell.
What happened to Itanium? The average consumer is very happy with a P2 even today, thank you very much, and probably doesn't need more. Why do we need to see the Itanium succeed in order to prove that the free market works?
I claim this is proof that the free market works because in 1999, the FTC was seriously considering hurting Intel, and what in the end hurts Intel, causes them to innovate, and causes them to make their products inexpensive is COMPETITION from AMD, not regulation from the FTC. Duh.
QED...
IBM's power4 chip has 4 processing cores on a chip. Intel and Sun have plans in the works. Intel will do this to follow up with the IA-32 Xeon processor. Here is a story on this
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
The diffrence between the pentium and the p-pro are rather minute when compared with the diffrence betwee any pentium/486/386/etc chip and the Itanium. To really answer your question, though you kind of have to look at the history of the whole thing.
:P)
To start things off, intel releases the 8086, and the cheaper 8088 (8086 with a 8, rather then 16 bit bus interface). And thus begins the x86 era.
A little later intel decides they need a 32 bit CPU, but rather then design a totaly new chip, they just add a bunch of extensions to the 16 bit one. They call this new chip the 386, and it's supposed to revolutionize everything. The chip is totaly backwards compatable with the old 8086's and 286s (so the old register AX becomes EAX, but you can still access the first half as AX).
for a long time (windows 3.1) most software still ran in 16 bit mode, not really utilizing the software. IIRC It wasn't untill windows95 and NT started getting used that people really started to take the full potential of their machines in every day tasks.
Now, this is also around the time of the Pentium and the Pentium pro. The pentium ran both 32 and 16 bit software quickly, but the ppro ran 32 bit software faster, and 16 bit software more slowly (of course, the p-pro core became the pentium II, then the pentium III and ran at much higher clockspeeds, so it eventualy became a non issue, a 1.3ghz pIII is going to crunch 16 code faster then a pentium233mmx no mater what
Now, when you look at what AMD is doing and I guess intel now with their rather odly named Yamhill is taking the orgional design and adding 64bit extensions the way they added 32 bit extensions to the 286. EAX becomes RAX, and you can get at the first half by calling it EAX and the first quarter by calling AX, etc.
Itanium is a totaly diffrent thing, it's a whole new system with x86 support tacked on extra, rather then tacking on 64 bit support to an aging archetecture.
Hrm, I hope that explains things.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Yes its called Superscaler.
Basically, every intel chip since the pentuim has had more then one 'execution' unit. The original pentuim had 2, but the second one was crippled.
The Pentium 2 was the first full superscalar intel chip. Now they throw all the 486 away though, as they take the instructions and turn them into many micro instructions, then have another internal execution engine that executes the new instructions, then reassembles them at the end. Why? because the x86 instruction set is too complex to build a processor that can handle all instructions in HW alone. So they turn the large instruction into many small ones. Then they have a core that is very superscalar and can execute the micro instructions very fast.
How is what you're suggesting different from Hyper-Threading or "Jackson" technology?
What's the point of adding more bits?
The absolute amount of memory which can be addressed in 32 bits, sans tricks, is 4GB. That's combined memory and swap. Quite a few people care about that kind of thing, namely just about anyone who runs any decent sized server.
Further, consider the rate at which system memory has been increasing, and project it a few years. If it continues, and I realize that maybe it won't, there's a problem.
C//
Microsoft is a monopoly because they own 95% of the desktop operating system market. Essentially, if software companies want to sell anything, they have to make it for Windows. And if businesses want to be able to use off-the-shelf software, all their employees, clients and vendors use Windows, so they must as well. It's a total catch-22.
Microsoft also operates in many different areas of the computer industry. Almost all of them, in fact. And the fact that they own the operating system means that they get to plaster Windows with "Buy MS Office!" and "Use MSN!" messages. And now, everyone uses MS Office, so it's the same problem. There has to be some standard interface between companies, and file formats have to be compatible and work *exactly as they are expected to*. Thus, people use Windows and MS Office.
Also, have you looked at Microsoft's pricing lately? I'm currently in college, and MS has some incredible discounts (as in $5 for Office, though this is also to train an entire generation to use their software, so the businesses that hire them will use it as well;) but Windows 2000 was something on the order of $300, Office is about the same. They really can charge whatever they want, and people will pay it, but they keep pricing at these levels so that they can defend themselves as "reasonable" in court.
Microsoft does have many competitors. Many small ones. If someone tried to develop an office suite comparable to MS Office, Microsoft would just buy the company for an insane amount of money. They're so big, they can crush the smaller players. They're having some trouble with Sony in the console wars, but only because Sony uses many of these same tactics (VGS and Connectix ring any bells?)
Intel never really had quite the monopoly Microsoft had. AMD/Cyrix/VIA have always been there, just not as a large presence, but large enough that Intel couldn't sweep them away. Intel just got unlucky actually, AMD decided to make a strong push on an existing market as Intel was trying to force a major (and expensive) technological change down the consumers' throats (RDRAM.)
And AMD's success is also largely due to consolidation within the marketplace. When Compaq bought Digital, most of the Alpha engineers bailed and went to AMD. The Alpha was an extremely advanced chip, so they brought their experience with them to AMD and helped design the Athlon, which was finally a product which could challenge Intel for real (they had been a major player in the budget market for years with the K6 series.) The Athlon is not just a "fight the man" sort of thing, it really is a good piece of engineering at a fair price.
All RISC really means anymore is that the microarchitecture is a load/store one. That is, you can't do an op like this:
add.w (a0)+, d0
Instead, your ALU ops have to be in regs first.
not to start a flame war, but i have been reading your posts and feel a need to speak up. also, i am probably way off topic.
i am all for competition and think people should try to make a better product. but it seems that the only reason you are willing to accept for why a monopoly might exist is that they make better stuff. companies have made products that were as good as or better than windows.
take Be. they made BeOS, which people still use even though it is dead. microsoft crushed it as it was just getting off the ground. they didn't just out-design Be, they told their vendors that they were not allowed to sell computers that did not also contain windows. microsoft also required them to diable BeOS by default. i fail to see how that makes windows a superior product. maybe it didn't have all of the features of windows, but operating systems to take time to develop. if they are stamped out in their infancy all of the innovation they might have had is lost. things like this also serve as a warning to others who would enter microsoft's turf. apple and the smorgasbord of *nixes survive because they are in different markets.
they innovate to the extent that you will be enticed into upgrading. make it cheaper in the short run to win in the long run.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
That's it. I'm done.
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I think it is very unlikely that the 8086 was designed in three weeks. I used to have a book on the 8086, written by the chip's architects.For what the chip was designed to do, they did a good job. Intel thought that most of the software for the chip would be written in PL/M or Pascal. The segmented architecture was a good match to those languages. The floating point hardware (8087) was a major advance, being the predecessor of IEEE floating point. 8080 programs could be mechanically translated into 8086 programs. The 8086 supported all of the peripheral chips that had been designed for the 8080.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
However, what is true is that the architecture, instruction set and so on of the 8086 was designed in only a few weeks leaving even the design of the x87 for later...when the engineers discovered that not enough opcodes had been left for a 2 register address machine and inflicting the awful register stack architecture to the rest of the world.
The final, off-topic question, is why IBM chose Intel (and M$) for the PC when much better designs (68000 for example) were available. There are seevral reasons to it: there was at the time no 8 bit version of the 68000 and this would have made the motherboard more costly, the 68000 with its non multiplexed bus in a 64 pin DIL package was coslty, and finally some claim that IBM thought that the chip was so awkward that it could never be extended past the toy level to compete with their bread and butter mini and mainframes.