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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."
And to think, even as recently as a year or two ago, Intel was being called a monopoly by the FTC and anti-capitalist socialist greens.
If this isn't proof that all "big businesses" can be affected by smaller ones, and to let consumers make and break businesses, rather than regulations, I don't know what is...
Innovation IS CRITICAL to progress. Consumers also want a good product at a price they can afford. While I personally haven't had much luck with AMD products, I know a lot of people who have, and I commend AMD on doing something by themselves that many socialist (democrat) Americans wanted the government to do -- make Intel realize they're not the only fish in the sea.
This has been the focus of some stories at the Inquirer as well.
Personally, I thought that Intel would have been in a good position to just relabel the Alpha 21364 as IA64 and be done with it.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I wonder if Intel is seeing what AMD saw over a year ago. Many people are looking at the latest greatest operating system and going... oh. That's nice. Does it run my old program? It doesn't? How do I get my Win98 back on there so it will?
Non-backwards compatibility was supposed to be a *benefit* for their new chip.
And now they're suddenly looking at backwards compatibility? Give it ten years *after* and they'll probably be able to *use* a non-backwards compatible chip.
Score one for AMD's clear thinking. No wonder they're breathing down Intel's neck.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
If it doesn't take off? It takes years to develop that kind of new architecture. By then AMD will have it swept.
Don't follow AMD. X86-64 is a follow on architecture, and whatever Intel comes up with wouldn't be much better even if it was different. Computers need to move away from that old decrepid IA32 instruction set eventually.
Intel has a new road and it is not entirely stupid. They are facing the same problem that everyone trying to compete with them has been facing for a long time: compatibility with the installed software base. Either you're compatible and can run IA32 or you're not and you have to come up with lots of other software (enter open source).
Eventually, CPUs needs to move to better architecture. backwards compatability is good during transition, but shouldn't hold you back too much. Go forth Intel and do what everyone else has had to do for a long time, (gasp) struggle for market share.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Any major redesign for a chip is very expensive, but minor changes can be done fairly cheap. So next time they have a major redesign they slap this feature on it. And then its a minor redesign to turn it on.
I would agree that it is cool. Yamhill is just outside of Portland, Oregon. It's not the most exciting place, but it's pretty.... *GRIN* It's nice to see a company using unique names for products. Hammer, Spike... roll over.. Spot! -jp
The SJMN article specifically says that Intel's Plan-B chip is being designed to be compatible with AMD's x86-64.
-- Guges --
I don't know what does. If you're a consumer who's pro intel and you've been waiting for YEARS for itanium to be released. Now, Only for it to be usurped by a stop gap processor to compete with a rival. My god. It's better than the nothing these guys have been waiting for and it will be ESPECIALLY painfull to those software houses who have been porting their flagship product to Itanium for some time now... If this chip yama..whatever is made it won't be a dog because they HAVE to compete not only with the marketshare in the 64 bit arena but more important is the MINDSHARE. AMD delievers and Intel doesnt and they both run Windows. We could see some real interesting things come out of Intel. It would also confirm the rumors I've been hearing for some time now that Itanium is dead after Mickenly.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
Don't you think that discussions of explict versus implicit parallelism might be beyond the scope of a press release? Come on.
C//
Totally impossible....P2,3,4 and Athlon use completely different Bus protocols.
However, its at least possible in theory, and with the right Bios to use Athlons and Alphas on the smae Motherboard...they use the same Bus protocol. Alwas thought that would have been interesting if someone had done that....:>
No real compeling reason to however.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
actually, klamath, deschutes, willamette, and yamhill are all rivers in oregon.
The great irony here is the following:
When AMD released the specifications of its upcoming 64-bit chips in the summer of 2000, these ``cowboy'' engineers decided that Intel needed to match its rival. They began developing their own 64-bit extensions to the Pentium line, making sure the code was compatible with AMD's design.
This is Intel imitating AMD, the very same company Intel execs have derided as immitators, recognizing the threat of the upcoming AMD Claw and Sledge Hammers. Another post suggests this compatibility is Innovation. What's innovative, as you noted, is selling something with the big feature turned off. How long before the enlightened OCP weasels figure out how to turn it on and spoild Intel's party?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Everyone remember the "Intel Inside" marketing campaign? Anyone remember "Authentic AMD"? The Intel Inside campaign was based mainly on FUD and Intel's control over the x86 processor. Since the x86 was a "defacto standard" defined by Intel, only Intel could gaurentee that it followed the standard. If you used other people's CPUs, they might work, but they might not. Better safe than sorry, right?
If Intel publically implements the x86-64 architecture, while more-or-less simultaneously dropping the IA64 architecture, it will be diaster. It would be publically admitting, in deed if not in word, that AMD controls the future evolution of the x86, not Intel. The best Intel could hope for would be for AMD to gain an incredible amount of credibility- which translates as sales in the lucrative but conservative buisness markets. Even worse, the current positions of AMD and Intel might even be reversed, with AMD being perceived as the flagship processor company and Intel the clone maker.
Going to 64-bit is rapidly becoming not an option. Many desktop systems are having a gigabyte of memory installed. Even x86 servers often have three gigabytes of ram installed. The server market is even worse off than the desktop market, as all the ram is generally given over to a single application (Exchange, or a database, for example)- and a 32-bit processor simply can not access more than about 2-3 gig of memory in a single application. The big-iron Unix cpus (Sun's SPARC, HP's PA-RISC, IBM's Power-4, etc) all went 64-bit years ago. It's not unusual to see even "moderate" servers of 4-, 8-, and 16- CPUs having tens of gigabytes of RAM already. The only market that still supports 32-bit CPUs is the embedded market- not a market Intel has ever displayed much interest in.
I figure that the x86 has maybe 3 years to go 64-bit across the board, or we'll be facing another 640K like situation. 3 years is two Moore's Law generations- meaning the people with 1G of memory today will be wanting 4G in 3 years, and the people only getting 256M today will be getting 1G. They'll continue to be hurt in the server market, but they won't lose much in the desktop. Unfortunately, to be 64-bit across the board means the high end needs to be 64-bit within about 18 months (allowing for a Moore's Law generation to push the 64-bit CPUs down the price scale).
Hammer is in a position to do that. McKinnley is the succeed or die point for the IA64. To use an analogy, Intel will have run out of runway- either it flies, or it'll hit the trees.
The successors don't matter- if McKinnley doesn't succeed, Hammer will be there to take the sales. If Intel stays in denial and doesn't offer a viable 64-bit path, they'll be in worse shape than simply admitting that they lost.
At that point, the best thing Intel could do is roll out a Hammer of their own, and plan on less than 50% market share.
Brian
Do you realize that your 136-node processor would draw 4-6 kilowatts of power (and so have to dissapate the same amount of heat!), depending on what processor architecture was used?
Would you name all the popular programs you can that scale well onto even 2 processors, and then define the word "parallelizable"?
Would you calculate the amount of time (expressed in trillions of years, exponential notation, or however you prefer) it would take to brute force a mainstream 128-bit encryption algorithm on this cluster?
Are you aware that current sound cards use 16 or 24-bit, 2, 4, or 5 channel, 44.1 (not 144) Khz technology? (I'm probably missing lots of combinations myself).
Would you please do a Google search for "Nyquist", and then explain to us exactly why you want "920 KHz" sound output?
Do you understand now why nobody is willing to "give you a chip plant"?
Do you mind if I use your post as an example, the next time someone else with a 4 or 5 digit UID complains that all the more recent Slashdot accounts are driving the quality of discussion downhill?
VILW is an old idea. It's been obsoleted by superscalar processors. It turns out to be better to find parallelism at run-time in hardware than to find it at compile time.
The real reason for the Itanium was to have something that had some intellectual property that AMD couldn't clone, allowing Intel to crank up the price and get their margins back up.
As for the AMD 64-bit machine, it's entirely vanilla. It's very x86 like, with the same instruction set, a few more registers (yay!), and of course the registers are longer. It has all the obvious backwards compatibility stuff. It comes up emulating a 32-bit x86 machine, so old OSs will run, but can be put into 64-bit mode. In 64-bit mode, it can simulate multiple virtual 32-bit machines, so you can have a 64-bit OS running both 64-bit and 32-bit processes. (Run 32-bit Windows under 64-bit Linux!)
Wierdly, the x86 instruction set isn't viewed as that bad today. The variable-length instructions aren't that much of a problem to decode any more. Speculative decode takes care of that. One big advantage of RISC architectures was that making all the instructions the same length simplified decode and allowed more look ahead. That's a dead issue. Making the instructions all the same length causes about a 2x code bloat, which is now unnecessary.
The other big RISC advantage was having lots of registers. Register renaming and caches have killed that advantage. Today, a register is just a short name for a recently referenced variable. There are far more registers inside a Pentium Pro and later than the few explicit ones you can mention in x86 code. In fact, one advantage to not having too many registers is that it shortens subroutine calls and context switches. The machines with huge numbers of explicit registers, like SPARC machines, put a lot of effort into saving and restoring them.