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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."
AMD Guy: Hehe..check out my incredible new processor. It's called the Hammer! What do you have in your box?
Intel Guy: Oh..er..I have a *unintelligible*
AMD Guy: What is that? Mumblican? Speak up!
Intel Guy: *coughYamhill*
AMD Guy: YAMHILL? Buwhahahahaha! Intel marketing loves you!
Intel Guy: *cry*
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.
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!
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."
what's with intel's names? celery.. err.. celeron, now YAMhill... where's the beef?
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!
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.
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........
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.
I am laughing at there choice of the yamhill river for the naming. I live about 3/4 of a mile from the river. They find two headed fish in it, I don't even want to know what will be found in the intel processor.
Expect it to look a lot like AMD's x86-64 architecture, although it will probably be gratuitously incompatible.
> ones where the government either mandated a private corporation
.. in fact, it's pretty much the other way around. Companies are successfully changing the laws in our countries, with very little public knowedge.
You display your ignorance here. You're not honouring the reality that since we, the people, have been more than happy to chip away at our goverments' ability and legal powers to mandate, regulate and punish (an idea that seems to make most rabid free-markerers piss thier pants in fear). Even a passing knowledge of the changes in trade laws and treaties over the past 40 years would allow you to comprehend that companies have more legal rights and powers on the international market scenes than governments themselves. It's real. People don't want to believe it, but it's real. Read up on NAFTA. Read up on any of the recent lawsuits being launched against governments world wide by private corperations, both domestic and abroad. The point is, it's harder than ever for a government to actually regulate the market or a company, due to the enormous size of corperations (and thus their economic leverage), and their successful con of the public at large in convincing Joe Blow that the government is a corrupt, antiquated insitution that does nothing but collects taxes and wastes money. In short, there is neither public support nor legal support for governments to control the markets much, even if they wanted to. The MS case is a good example of this. Another good example is of a Canadian company suing Santa Monica for 1.3 billion dollars in punative damanges, because Santa Monica was forced to buy 80 of their drinking water at a cost of 3 million dollars per year becuase this company's unsafe product contaminated dozens of free water wells. The State of California (along with 9 other states) has banned their product, and thus, is being sued for it. See? It's way beyond governments regulating anything right now
"Old man yells at systemd"
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 believe M$ is a monopoly.
Legally, they are. Common sense also says that they are a monolpoly.
The only monopolies we've had historically are ones where the government either mandated a private corporation (telcom, energy, etc), or the government subsidized one corporation and tariffed, penalized, or regulated its competition (Standard Oil, etc).
Huh? Pray tell, where was the Government Mandate or Government Subsidy in the United Shoe Machinery case (to pick one past monopoly)?
United Shoe Machinery (USM) had between 75% and 85% of the shoe machinery market. USM refused to sell it's machinery but only leased, on ten year leases. It also compelled leasees to agree that if they required an additional machines they must lease from USM. USM also provided free maintenance to their machines (or, alternatively, the lease cost included maintenance). The court found that the restictive lease and the free maintenance were barriers to entry by other companies, and removed them from the agreements.
Not a hint of mandate or subsidy here, yet USM were clearly a monopoly (which is quite legal), and were using that monopoly position to quench competition (which is quite illegal).
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.
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//
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?
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
Now you are making fun of Yamhill. Not only a river, but a city as well, and a major east-west running street in Portland. If you ever come to Portland, check out Yamhill street. Lots of cool stuff, nice place to get drunk.
Would everyone please lay the fuck off already. We're proud of Intel around here and we're proud of our rivers, cities, and streets. I don't make fun of people who live in New York, even if "York" is a pretty stupid sounding word.
Grow up, assholes.
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.