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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's almost a miracle that in the i86 space we have two competing vendors. Actually it IS a miracle.
The benefits of the competition are too lengthy to get into here, but I would STRONGLY encourage the folks who benefit from it to put their money where their thanks are, and support AMD by buying their products to insure their continued success.
When they say that they will make this but hope never to turn it on, I can't believe they mean they will put it into the chips but disable it, but that's what it sounds like.
Presumably they mean that they would have the design ready to add to the chips very quickly should it prove commercially necessary.
It's nice to hear they have a backup plan. I've always liked intel chips better than AMD for some reason. (Yes I know I'm probably the only one, and I know there isn't any good reason to so don't flame me for that).
Sig is taking a break!
Haven't they heard of pipelining and superscalar architecture? Is that statement a result of:
- Intel's marketing folks having no clue
- SJMN reporter not doing his homework
It's quite possible that this processor family makes more advanced use of superscalar architecture and multiple pipelines, but statements like his portray a false idea. I bet we won't see a retraction."What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I always wondered why they didn't just put three or four processors on a single chip and have instance multiprocessing. I'm sure they would be able to share some of the components that way and reduce the transistor count below what several separate cpus would costs.
And interprocessor communication and cache coherency control would all be on the same chip and so probably easier than normal multiprocessor design.
There is probably a good reason I don't know about so it's a good thing I don't design cpus for a living.
Sig is taking a break!
Well I have developed on ITANIUM, (IA64) It leaves some to be desired, it is a first gen 64 for intel in the consumer market though. I ported BOCHS to the
Itanium, the result can be seen here This may sound loopy at firt but when you look at the backward IA32 incompatibilities, I need a way to test those from within the SAME enviromet.
The IA64 is a pretty lame first attempt from Intel, In my opion, I actually unlike others who will comment have direct experience, I should be getting access to a Hammer shortly, I have heard VERY good things, AMD's effort is much more likley to be a success for several reasons,
But the point I am trying to make is it looks like intel has really dragged its feet here, it cant decide if this is a market to be in or not, If AMD come through as I expect they will Intel will have a HELL of a time playing catchup.
AMD will play to a MUCH broader market than intel can envision, YES I WANT ONE ON MY DESKTOP, And Intel dosent see that market exists YET, then again Intel has never pushed bit copmputing capability, it has almost always lagged at LEAST 2 generations (16 bit when 32 and 64 were availabe) Some of this is vendor support, some of it lack of commitment to it, look at the clock speeds on the Itanium's and tell me, do they really expect this 64 bit pig to fly ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Yeah congratulations, maybe some day they can grow up to be Macs. How long have Macs had 64 bit processors? On the website for the new Imacs it claims 128 bit processing. Is that just a buffering register trick of the hand thing? Not to trigger another big Mac thread but can someone answer that for me? I don't think it's true 128 bit processing. But what do I know... don't answer that.
It's a good thing that Apple made the switch from 68k architecture to PowerPC architecture years ago. This enabled them to have an advanced architecture with a lot of breathing room. For example, since these chips aren't backwards compatible (the PowerPC is) it's going take a lot of time before people begin to catch on to the new architecture. As for the PowerPC it has a lot of room to still grow. Additions like alti-vec, etc Are mearly extensions and not any program I know of yet REQUIRES alti-vec to run. It's about time Intel and AMD starts to deviate from the old x86 architecture.
If this isn't proof that all "big businesses" can be affected by smaller ones, and...
Do you honestly believe that Intel, if it were legal, wouldn't snap up AMD in an instant just to do away with the competition? Come now.
C//
The most interesting thing I got out of this article was near the end. They mention that the 8086 was Intel's "backup plan" twenty years ago and that it was designed in THREE WEEKS! I think we finally have an explanation for why the instruction set is such a pain to work with.
As another former Oregonian, I will add a little more here.
The Intel CPU code-names are not based upon placenames in Oregon.
They are all *names of rivers* in western North America, primarily Oregon and Northern California (where Intel has most of their employees). The fact that some of them are *also* the names of cities, counties, forests, etc is quite beside the point.
Klamath River (in OR/CA)
Deschutes River (in OR)
Yamhill River (in OR)
Mendocino River (in CA)
Coppermine River (in Canada)
Merced River (in CA)
Tillamook River (in OR)
Katmai River (in AK)
Well, that's all I can think of off the top of my head.