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First Benchmarks of AMD Hammer Prototype
porciletto writes "As seen on Ace's Hardware, this article features Quake 3 benchmarks comparing an 800 MHz ClawHammer sample to Athlon MPs at 800 MHz and 1667 MHz, as well as a Willamette Pentium 4 (256 KB L2, 400 MHz FSB) at 800 MHz and 1600 MHz. The benchmark results indicate a 40% performance increase over an Athlon MP for the ClawHammer. Additionally, the 800 MHz ClawHammer manages to tie (actually outperform by 1 FPS) the 1667 MHz Willamette Pentium 4."
They tested some software which had been compiled for 64 bit mode. With the large number of 64 bit registers the hammer has there should be some significant speed improvement.
Expect a massive FUD attack from Intel in the coming months as they try to convince the world that their chips aren't really inferior to those from AMD.
they are supposed to be out somewhere within october - december, but in very limited numbers..(something like 10,000) with early 2003 still being slim on chips. production is supposed to pick up Q2 of 2003. Thats word around the campfire anyways. we all know how definate any of this will end up being.
adventure-today.com
Thats only fair. Germany has just declared war on the Jones boys, after all.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I can't think of a good reason to justify a upgrade to 64bit. Its killing me, not to have a reson to get one... or four.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
is "Opteron" (see http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_4699,00.html)
I don't take any notice till i see the notepad.exe benchmark.
I currently have two Intel P4 machines; my laptop (Inspiron 8200) and my machine at work. I would rather have gotten an AMD chip in both cases, but on the laptop, I was shopping for features and had to get an Intel processor based machine to get the other features that I wanted, and with the work machine, I took what they gave me.
Having two AMD machines at home, a Tbird 1400 and an Athlon XP 1700+, I'm seriously underimpressed by the P4 performance. As far as I can tell, the only reason to buy Intel anymore is out of pure inertia; they bring nothing to the table.
ps -- where is the obligatory Beowulf cluster commentary on this??? I am shocked and appalled at this apparent oversight by my fellow /.'ers...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Why is Quake the benchmark of a good processor? Maybe computers can do something other than cache intense graphics?
Gah.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you have problems with that, then put the cover back on your computer. And I don't think you are going to be cooking very much because microwave ovens are designed to put out microwaves at several hundreds of watts. I don't think that's how these processors are designed.
*dread*
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I expect so. Give them until next summer (2003) and there will probably be a Pentium V which will be x86-64, run at 1.5 times the clock frequency of the AMD one and be almost as fast. Then expect Dell to start making "low-end" servers out of it. A year later, itanic will be all but dead and buried.
Stick Men
If you manage to get through the slashdotting, the story in the tecchannel web pages is amazing. The prototype Clawhammer, while limited to 800 MHz, performed shockingly well on the few, but varied, benchmarks they subjected it to. It's interesting that both Intel and AMD teach the same lesson, that MHz doesn't determine performance. Unfortunately for Intel, they demonstrate it by the P4 not running as fast as the MHz would imply, where the AMD chips run far faster than MHz would imply.
I can't wait for these chips to get out there.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Normally I would be a sarcastic dick and say 'about when Mozilla 1.0 comes out', but that won't work anymore.
Don't worry, though. You can still refer to indefinitely long time periods as 'about when the Hurd is released'.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
It would be faster if it will drop old compatibility layer (x86) and go on as full 64-bit proccessor. Remember what happened to 6800 architecture when motorola compleatly redesigned new 68000 processor line from ground up? 68000 serie rocked (and it still rocks on embedded applications). Well, that's what i think a x86 should do... and intel got that point allready..
Sadly, compatibility is impotant only for small time...
Can that hammer smash a block of itanium without breaking?
$ yes >
Will there be 64bit x86 proccessors from intel at all? ;)
BTW, MIPS architecture rules...
Or SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 if they want to sound more `benchmark-like' at the cost of some money. If they want to be Windows-ish, compare the rendering time of some HUGE web pages on IE6.
Having both the old x86 and new 64-bit instructions on the same CPU is a nice thing for users. They can still run their old apps, but they should also see that native 64-bit programs are much faster. That way, they have the incentive to upgrade the software. If they do this as planned, AMD's next line of processors could well be purely 64-bit.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
On the front page of the article they say "The Texas-based company may propably not be too happy about these early benchmark results. "
.....what? The benchmarks show that it totally spanks everything else that is within range of it. I fail to understand how these could possibly be unsatisfying results for AMD.
the chip was locked at 800Mhz because it's a developer's sample. The actual chips, when they're released, will be at higher clock rates. if an 800Mhz Hammer can spank a Wilhelmette clocked at twice the speed, what will happen when the Mhz field is leveled a bit?
i could live a little longer in this prison
As has been said, Quake is only relevant to the chips concerned in that it only tests the 32-bit compatability of the Opteron. I would have like to see some tests that demonstrated the advantage of 64-bit processors over 32-bit processors. Granted, the reviewers only wanted to show benchmearks that the populous was familar with and they were pressed for time. Let's give them a break for that.
Nahtanoj
"This is a server chip. Benchmark it using a database, a web server, number crunching, etc."
In case you don't know, Clawhammer is meant for desktops/workstations. Hell, there's even a mobile version of it in the pipeline! Then we have Clawhammer DP (dual-processor) and Sledgehammer that are meant for servers.
Please, get your facts straight before opening your mouth!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Not to take either side...
But if Intel was going to supercede a messy architecture like X86, I wish they'd done something better than IA64. While the jury is still out on the merits of IA64, it has some of the marks of Internal Politics on it. It sounds like a VLIW camp inside Intel sold some management on a renamed version of the basic approach, and the project gathered Corporate Inertia.
At the same time, it doesn't sound as if all of the VLIW problems have been solved on the compiler side, so it's not clear that IA64 is doing any more than a clean, modern architecture cable of OOO execution could have done.
Out of the Hammer series, I'm reminded/hoping for the phenomenon described in "Soul of a New Machine", where they managed to clean and extend the old architecture at the same time. By the time they were done, the old architecture was an ugly wart on the side of a new clean one. The fear was the new being an uglier wart on the side of an already ugly one, and they avoided it.
I don't know enough about Hammer to know what the case is. I have the documents, but haven't made time to read them. I've also heard some rumblings that some of the performance improvements to IA64 involve de-purifying it's VLIW to pick up OOO techniques. I've heard that VLIW was an attempt to sidestep OOO because those prolems were feared, but in the meantime the industry has learned how to do OOO pretty well.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No, it outperforms the 1600 by 1FPS. Still quite the feat. If this thing releases at even 1200mhz, you're looking at something comparable to a P4 2.4ghz. The site does say they stated they were aiming for 1.6ghz (nice!), but we'll see if that actually happens.
It's nice to see that the industry isn't playing too much of the "more is faster" game, at least as much as they used to. When an 800mhz part is comparable to a 1600mhz, you've got to wonder what intel isn't doing to optimize.
It's obvious computing needs and trends are changing rapidly. PC are no longer luxury items as they once were. They are now taken for granted and no one cares about the technology behind it anymore. With all the cheap PC's out there, the PC is becoming less high tech and more every day. Back when PC first started, it was new and different, but now it's just another appliance. With that kind of perception taking over the PC industry, no one gives a damn how many ghz a pc has.
Sure there's always gamers and programmers who want the newest/best system. But that will change in another year or two. Perhaps that's why Intel is starting to focus more on telecommunications and less on consumer CPU.
Claw hammer, slegde hammer. What's next, Jack hammer?
or maybe warhammer, I bags a chaos chip
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
...doesn't have the same ring.
~jeff
Why don't you read the article first?
They did not test it on Quake 3 because it is most suited to measure Hammer performance.
Access to this hardware was not given by AMD but leaked out by some 3rd party.
They used it because they needed a quick solution while they had access to the system and do some secret benchmarking...
As the other guy said clawhammer is the consumer chip. Also Quake 3 is an excellent test of memory usage, bus speed, and in general overall performance of a computer. It uses everything the computer can give it, and more. Hmm can wait to start benchmarking computers with DOOM 3
This is a 64bit processor running in a 32bit mode that's as fast as a true 32bit processor at 1/2 the clock speed. When released it will be able to run existing 32bit apps at the same speed as the highest line of Intel processors while adding 64bit support. Thats where the true performance will shine.
Hurd may actually be released soon. I think your much safer with Duke Nukem: Forever, or the 1GHZ Transmeta
It's just a sample. AMD released the Clawhammer processor to manufacturers for demonistrations and testing, so they can develop the platform, so that, get this, benchmark results would not be released. Let's face it - who in their RIGHT MIND would benchmark an 800MHz CPU against the latest and greatest processors?
Obviously, these guys did. AMD will NOT be happy about this.
Also remember that the Opteron will be running at MUCH higher clock speeds upon release. I'd guess above the 2GHz range for sure, but AMD doesn't want anybody to know that. This also suggests that this lil' 800MHz sample could be very overclockable.
This is AMD's weapon that can really take a LOT of market share. Microsoft already have a Windows XP build ported to the Opteron/x86-64 platform. The Opteron runs cooler, as well.
One thing that disappoints me - I have not seen ONE PCI64 slot on any of these test boards!! I hope that this'll be worked out before release.
...or that graphics chip from BitBoys.
while true; do eject; eject -t; done
You are also getting the same framerate on an 800 MHz clawhammer compared to a 1600 MHz P4. Maybe that says something?
The chip also is designed for desktop machines too. It is just the start of new 64 bit architecture for the desktop. The will most likely make a server oriented multi-processor model of the Clawhammer, like they did with the XP to MP CPUs.
Ever benchmarked an 800Mhz G4? or even a 400Mhz G4 Ti laptop? Those things fly a hell of a lot faster than the Mhz would suggest, and if anyone would write games at the Altivec core, they would also fly. See the numbers a 400Mhz G4 dnetc client runs at, and then compare them to my 1.3Ghz AMD. The G4 beats out my computer by about a Gkey/sec. I am so glad to see AMD build a chip which is more efficient with the time it has (800million clock cycles/second :). That little Ti laptop renders video much better than anything i have here in windows. Maybe now i will be able to beat my Mac head friends at Photoshop renders ;-) (btw, OSX++)
While I agree that there have been some horrible chipsets for AMD CPUs, there are also some good ones. Most chipsets are pretty decent these days. The last couple of AMD based machines that I built, with Asus mainboards (K7V266E) have been rock solid, doing even video capture with a BT848 card (a good acid test of a mainboard) for hours on end without any problems. Some Intel based mainboards can't do as well.
When switching to an unknown mainboard, I go with a manufacturer I know to build good stuff, and make sure I beat the hell out of the mainboard before my return policy time runs out.
Traditionally bad and buggy chipsets from Via is one reason. If you go out there almost all mainboards use Via southbridge and we all know that its IDE is b0rken and its PCI performance is only a percentage of what it should be.
The unavailability of low profile how performance rack servers with AMD is another reason. Basically the smallest reasonable Athlon multiprocessor machine is 4U. For the last half a year I have been looking at how to get away from Intel for a task which AMD has always done better and I still cannot.
Unavailability when it comes to most brands/models oriented to be the common low end corporate machines. Basically, usually you cannot get AMD machines along existing contracts/discounts.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
remember diakatana? all of our zeal over the hammer may end the same way, wait patiently
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I know far too many people who have built AMD boxes - people who certainly know what they are doing - to have them crash and burn on a number of applications and games. The problem is so widespread across the AMD platform that the processor is the only logical point of failure.
I am one of those people, and I tend to disagree with you. I had a machine subject to random lockups and general disintergration of system integrity (on linux!). It was a K6-2 on a FIC-VA503+. The motherboard had issues. My friend who went with a nearly idenitcal system but used an older FIC motherboard with a higher stepping never had any problems, and is still using the machine today, five years later (six?).
I am not saying that the K7 is definitely not to blame, but it is also not the only logical point of failure. The amount of poorly tested crap that comes out for the K7 is a suspect for higher failure rates.
OTOH, the last two AMD machines I have built, a TBird 1.0 GHz on an Asus A7V133A, and an XP 1800+ on an A7V333 have worked flawlessly.
Plus, I don't think I need to bring up the issue of the flaming AMD Athlon in too much detail to get everybody's minds on that Toms Hardware video. There have been rebuttals and claims of inaccuracy from the AMD camp, but for the record:
Removing the heatsink/fan from a P4 chip caused the machine to BSOD.
Removing the heatsink/fan from an Athlon caused it to BURST INTO FLAMES AND MELT
I don't care what the details of the situation were, I have absolutely zero desire to run a chip that has the possibility of catching fire. There's an old saying that I'm rather fond of, it goes "The bitterness of poor quality lasts much longer than the sweetness of low cost." If you buy AMD simply because it's cheaper... eh. Your machine, your loss.
This is no longer a valid argument. If you are willing to shell out the $40 for a quality Mobo, then you are now likely to get thermal protection. If my heatsink falls off with my Asus A7V333, the chip does not fry. However, this fall would crush my All-In-Wonder 7500, which I am more worried about.
ONE NIL!
ONE NIL!
That was classic intercourse!
Yeah, I remove the heatsink from my machine while it's running all the time...
I saw the video too, and while it's amusing, I fail to see how this could even happen. The heatsinks on AMD CPUs is on so hard you need to work at it to get it off. Anybody who has one "accidentally" fall off didn't put it on right in the first place.
Your car (ANY car) will burst into flames if you remove the gas line from the engine and point it at the exhaust manifold while it's running with the engine hot. Same situation; something that's NEVER going to happen in real life, unless the thing was put together wrong in the first place.
BTW, what I do most is video encoding, mainly VCD and SVCD using TMPGEnc. For that application, the Athlon XP 1700+ (running at 1.47 GHz) absolutely BLOWS AWAY the P4 running at 1.6 GHz. I mean, it's a LOT faster, and the P4 has more RAM and everything so it has no excuse. AMD might finish a job in 2.5 hours and the P4 would take well over 3 hours to do the same job.
Don't ask me about game performance, hell, I don't even have Solitare loaded.
A good, really good intel chip is the 1.6 GHz Northwood. They are ~$137 on pricewatch, and have incredible overclocking capabilities.
Most people are sorely dissapointed with their 1.6a if it only overclocks to 2.2 GHz (stable with standard cooling). Most people can ramp it up to between 2.4 and 2.6.
At that speed, it can smoke everything AMD is offering, and at a low cost. Lots of the OCers are buying the P4 1.6a with an Asus P4S533 motherboard.
we replaced out Pentium III on Intel 840 workstations with Athlon Thunderbird and Palomino on AMD 760. We have suffered SIGNIFICANTLY less crashes and random lockups with our Athlon based 'stations. We used Gigabyte mobos in both cases - we have certainly found the GA-7DX series to be excellent.
That was classic intercourse!
oh and don't bother commenting on the fact that I switched timings ;-)
---
You might wanna take a look at this 1U Quad AMD system from Angstrom Computers
Personally, I haven't heard of any Quad CPU AMD mobo's at all
- more than 2GB address space for your programs? I've loaded 6GB of hash table data on a 64 bit platform, and that's peanuts compared to what people are doing with some current database servers. You just can't do that kind of work on a 32 bit platform.
- never having to compile with -D_LARGE_FILES (or your compiler's equivalent) again!
- avoiding the 2038 problem completely!
I'm sure someone can come up with reason number four for you... Once you get used to 64 bits (like Tru64, or Linux on Alpha for example), it's difficult to go back.Why do you have a Pentium? A 286 is plenty fast to run DOS WordPerfect.
Basically the smallest reasonable Athlon multiprocessor machine is 4U.
WTF have you been smoking, I can get dual processor 1U Athlon MP designs from litterally dozens of vendors! Many beowolf clusters of late have been based on this exact configuration, a couple gigs of ram and 2 high speed Athlons in 1U is a sick computation density that can only be rivaled by the new 1U dual Alpha boxes from hpaq, but those cost about $25-40,000 so the Athlons still easily win on performance/cost/space considerations.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'll start this by saying YES, I work for Intel. Hate me...whatever.
/.ers so ignorant on something like the computer scene. I'm talking about all the AMD LOVE and Intel hatred posts that always follows a news article about CPU's.
But its SOOOOO disheartening to see my fellow nerds and
I can understand the love for Linux. A group of people programming for free, fighting a giant like Microsoft. But why should AMD garner the same sort of love and respect? AMD is a giant corporation itself, willing to screw you over. They'd charge you $2000 per processor if Intel wasn't around (and yes Intel would do the same).
Last week Intel dropped the prices of its processors. AMD was forced to follow suit, dropping their prices about 2 days later. Did the Slashdot community cheer Intel?
So along comes this news...AMD Opteron 800 MHz beats a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz by one frame pre second. I guess I fail to see why everyone is so excited?
I'll wager ANYTHING that when it ships, a 800MHz Opteron will sell for at LEAST twice the price of a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz.
Why do I even bother.
AMD will be doubling the speed and stepping, with a targe tof 1600 to 2000MHZ. They are also doubling the onboard cache of ClawHammer.
Intel will have a pure 64bit chip out with 1/2 the 32bit performance of todays PIV (their words mind you). Since it will take years for 32bit apps to disappear, this is a big deal. Their first 64bit chips will come out at 2.4 - 3GHZ, but with half the 32bit performance and only 1/3 the FPU performance since intel worries more about MHZ than individual operation efficiency.
The ClawHammer should ber 20 - 40% faster out of the gate initially, and AMD has plans to ramp up the speed to 3GHZ by mid summer. Intel has no plans to ramp up speed on their 64bit chip beyond 3.5GHZ in 2003.
It's all speculation, but get your facts right at least.
Yes, you're right, desktop users are far better off spending their money on a decent monitor/hard disk/amount of memory. However, chips like this mean seriously powerful low-budget servers are possible. Personally I'm hoping my uni dept ditches their outdated ultra60s and goes for a few of these when they come out
Yeah, I remove the heatsink from my machine while it's running all the time...
I saw the video too, and while it's amusing, I fail to see how this could even happen. The heatsinks on AMD CPUs is on so hard you need to work at it to get it off. Anybody who has one "accidentally" fall off didn't put it on right in the first place.
Haha... what I worry about is catastrophic "smash the flathead screwdriver through the motherboard while trying to loosen the clip" failure.
or also, catastrophic "heatsink clip breaks off the cheap plastic socket notch upon removal" faliure.
Much more likely...
If anything, I wish AMD would do more in the way of promoting bolted heatsinks rather than the cheesy clips.
Its two seperate two-way motherboards in a single 1U. It even has two seperate power switches and power supplies in the back.
Heh. I was fooled the first time I saw that too.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Is the Athlon K7 EVER going to run on Linux properly??????
Alex
NO SIG
You may find this useful for "Real computer users". Kindly forward this information as appropriate:
ironic Pronunciation Key (-rnk) also ironical (-rn-kl) adj.
Characterized by or constituting irony. Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.
Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended: madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker.
You'll also find this defintion useful:
twit Pronunciation Key (twt)
tr.v. twitted, twitting, twits
To taunt, ridicule, or tease, especially for embarrassing mistakes or faults. See Synonyms at ridicule.
n.
The act or an instance of twitting.
A reproach, gibe, or taunt.
Slang. A foolishly annoying person.
---
A fake newspaper reports:
Senator F. Bar R-51st state announced the drafting of a new technology bill. It requires that all CPU chips conform to a regulated speed quantifier. This will allow all chips to be able to be easily compared with one another to end industry confusion. The unit, abbreviated IHz (Intel Hertz), was developed by the Intel Corporation. They have lobbied to get this standard, which will be controled and policed by a board of independent persons funded by Intel, adoped into Federal law....
ughh..
In the real world, where people dont usually just run the few micro-benchmarks Motorola's CPUs excel in, you need high speed execution of long strings of dependent serial instructions ... trying to improve performance by architecture alone runs into diminishing returns awfully fast, only MHz helps there in the end. Thats AMD's bread and butter, and Im pretty sure they realise that.
...
As everything in life you can go overboard of course, Intel might have gone a little overboard to one side (too many pipeline stages) but Motorola is too far overboard on the other side to play a part in the high performance processor buessinuess (which is why Apple will probably have to switch to IBM wholesale in the near future, especially with Motorola giving up trying to keep their semiconductor processes competetive for high speed logic).
AMD probably wont close the MHz gap, but they do not intend to lag it to the same extent as before
Still, I'm eagerly awaiting the ClawHammer release. Every x86 box I've built for the last 5 years has been pure AMD, and I've been quite happy with them.
Thank you very much. As you have sussed out, I am just getting to grips with sed :-)
Stick Men
Which one uses more electricity / produces more heat? . Hence uses more fossil fuel AMD... which has worst price for performance Intel ... So what type of efficiency are you talking about?
i just find it weird for the community to really compare the new hammer with the p4 product line of intel. if the main reason behind the hammer is to directly compete in the server line, then it should be the hammer vs itanium2 vs sparc vs pa-risc vs alpha vs powerpc. if you are going to compare it with p4, a professional will not even take you seriously.
why use a some low form benchmark. although i understand that the current systems are in prototype, the benchmark should reflect something of the server world including but not limited to tpc, spec, etc. i would really love seeing the performance of hammer in a oracle/sql/db2 or other database benchmark. i would love seeing the hammer handling ssl transactions and others.
with regards to amd using x86 with compatibility to 32bit, would it be dumb if you would run some non native applications? this means that amd anticipates that companies will not optimize their software to run on pure 64bit platform. this may be an indication that the initial design is not intended for the server product line. running 64bit does not make you compete in the server arena!!!!! the server market is a very different ball game compared to the consumer - cpu is not the prime reason.
and x86 is obsolete. it is not the efficient out there so it is time for a major change in the hardware world.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
6GB has table?
You've better have a *really* big memory, or you'll suffer terrible performance due to pagin.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Look at this: Itanium back in '95 at the end of section HP Technical Briefing Report, and you'll see the talk about the PA9000 processor, a VLIW based processor. In fact the Itanium is much more similar to PA-RISC (could be called PA-RISC 3.0) than to the x86. PA-RISC developpement had been based on need while maintaining a clean architecture. There is also MIPS that architecture changes are apporved by a comitee as another way of design.
As I understand, it's called Yamhill, and it's basically a hedge against the fact that no one paid attention to Itanic and there aren't a whole lot of people lined up to get their hands on McKinley either.
/Brian
As a fellow ECE, I'll give Intel a mark in the "innovative" column on IA-64. But the concepts of predication, EPIC and compiler-time optimizations we're NOT good enough to even make the new architecture competitive when not considering x86 compatibility. And Intel needs to be smacked for all those stupid extensions -- it's funny to see AMD accomodating them with less effort than Intel.
Alpha has always been the "64-bit RISC of RISCs" and they had binary translation techology c/o FX!32 so Linux/x86, NT/x86 and VMS/VAX apps could run on Linux/Alpha, NT/Alpha and VMS/Alpha, respectively. It was not only original, but using binary translation on the same OS, but different architecture, works far better for compatibility in software than general (any OS) architectural compatibility in hardware/microcode! With Alpha 364 at 0.13um would be kicking IA-64 butt. I mean, 3-year old Alpha 264 0.25um processors beat IA-64 at the same clock speeds!
Anyhoo, as a fellow EE/ECE, please read this post I made a few weeks ago and let me know what you think. It is entitled "How AMD and its partners are putting x86 back on the right track ... ". IA-64 was an ideal and novel concept, one that is not so good based in reality where good branch prediction is better than predication, and run-time optimization is just as important as compile-time. The Alpha 364 team predicted the "problems" with IA-64, which came true.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
This would be cool. Get a really tiny skillet, remove your heat-sink/fan whatever cooling device, put the skillet on the cpu, put a drop of pancake batter in the skillet, and cook yourself a genuine CPU pancake.
Make about 1000 of these, and you'll have a nice breakfast.
Now That Would Be Cool.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Though the G5 has over twice as many opcodes as any cisc in history ever did, but RISC definition
keeps changing over the years.
NO. RISC's definition isn't changing. RISC's definition, by those who grokked the concept as opposed to those who learned of the concept from marketing material, has never meant low number of opcodes. ( that may have been somewhat of a side effect characteristic of the design philosophy, but merely a side effect if instruction set's domain was limited.).
RISC was philosophy of having a non baroque set of opcodes (polynomials, every addressing mechanism under the sun, etc.) , minizming wierdo registers, and minimizing to a set of "first principle operations". The last does NOT mean there is a small number of first principle operations. The PowerPC has SIMD operations along with more usual operations. Those are orthoganal to each other, so "more" does not necessarily more "complex".
In short, "Reduced" is in contrast to "Complex" not "Number". RISC suffers more from being a clever acronym that marketing found appealing, not from a changing definition.
Go to google groups.... look in comp.arch for John Mashey about the early 90's ( back when comp.arch had a substantially higher signal to noise ratio).
Or read an Hennesy and Patterson book.
I realy don't care if a CPU is supposed to be used in a Server or a Wrist Watch. If it gives me the power I want, I buy it.
:)
Gruss
H.
(And after all, there are wrist watches around with a higher price tag than servers
I was J O K I N G
That was classic intercourse!
Apparently you haven't been reading the intel 'roadmap' for CPU performance/temperature. they've estimated that within ten years heat dissipation requirements on a CPU will be in the 1000 watt range. Already a modern CPU is almost double the heat displacment of an Easy bake oven. We've all laughed at the guy who cooked an egg on his Athlon, but you do have a good point. the case on a computer would provide more than adequate shielding, not to mention the heat sink. However, even if a 2400 mhz CPU was kicking out 100 watts of microwave energy it still would be barely enough to defrost a chicken. Most of the wasted wattage is converted to heat, not radio or microwave, so truly this is a non-issue.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
me too :P
...and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'
AMD hit the nail on the head (sorry, no pun intended, really) by keeping it around. Intel basically said screw everyone; buy new everything. AMD basically said we're going to ween you. Rather than making the chip with the best absolute architecture, they made one that gives us a giant step toward a better architecture without really delivering a big financial hit. I love it. Strategically giving a lesser product to set us up for a better one down the road when were all on 64 bit processing.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
By the way what exactly is a beowulf cluster?
Read this.
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
Having used non-Intel chips since the NexGen Nx586, this is all very true. It is a new phenomonen that is entirely VIA fault however. The Athlon was hit hard by terrible taiwanese chipsets. My first athlon mobo had a VIA KT133 chipset, and I ultimately had to retire it due to excessive system instability and incompatibility with other major component manufacturers like ATi and Creative.
That said, my new nvidia based ASUS board is fast and incredibly stable. With a SB Audigy Ex and an ATI Radeon 8500 AIW, I have not had a single crash since I turned this puppy on.
Of course, my personal anecdotal evidence means nothing, but read any review on the web and the Nvidia chipsets are fast and rock solid. The Intel chipset advantage is now gone. Nvidia and AMD are going to completely dominate the home market, and hopefully the professional market.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Yes, you are so right. 8GB on that particular machine. That's my entire point -- you just can't do that on a 32 bit platform (without segmentation schemes that for all I know don't exist).
Wasn't that where they had the Olympics a while back. Dave's mom was there. I'm sure of it.
So AMD named their new chip after an Olympic city... hmmm who woulda thunk it.
That would be ridiculous, no one could claim rights to a generic word like 'hammer', I mean, that's like claiming no one can use the word 'door' or 'windows'. Oh wait...
I disagree. From a pure geek perspective I never bought off on the idea of RISC. It's a damn stupid idea. CISC is by far the best performing architecture. With RISC you push the complexity into software, which means that your programs are larger, and therefore put a larger stress on IO. This is the opposite of what you want. You want to limit the number of and the redundancy of your instruction set. Use IO to move data, not instructions. This is what vector computing is all about. MMX/SSE/3D-Now et. al are a limited implimentation of vector instructions.
AMD CPUs are fine for me, just pick a good mobo, I have a dual MP 1800+ sitting here using a Tyan 2466N mobo with 1GB ECC registered DDR, and it is rock solid, $1000 or so less than an equivalent Prestonia box, and plenty fast enough. The fact that AMD is producing MP processors that I am happy to use in servers is a testament to how far they have come, Intel IMHO seem to be more and more driven by ad campaigns than delivering great technology to customers, which is pretty sad.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
The benchmarks were not done by Ace's Hardware. Ace Hardware merely provides a summary and link to the actual article at tecchannel.de. These were the ones who got their hands on the chip and did the benchmarking.
This is slightly off-topic and a shameless plug, but it might be interesting to people visiting Linux Tag.
I'm giving a talk saturday at 14.00 about the hammer (a.k.a. x86-64), talking about the machine and whats in it. I will also tell a lot about how the port was done, how we worked with AMD and so on.
I worked on binutils, gcc and all sorts of other porting for SuSE over the last 18 months.
If you have any questions related to the hammer on Linux, come talk to me at the show or send me an email.
Bo Thorsen,
bo at suse dot de
Difference being that the ClawHammer will come out at about 1GHz and the Willamette will then be at the 3Ghz mark, and soon be replaced by the 90 nanometer Prescot introduced with a 667 FSB and a 3.2GHz clock speed. AMD has recently run into some performance and heat problems with their next line of .13 micron 32 bit CPU's despite the smaller die and reduced power requirements. The processor (x86) offers little performance gain over its additional Athlon XP line that is at its max potential (as opposed the 10GHz max potential of the existing P4 line). The Itanium 2 benchmarks show a great deal of potential as well. I wouldn't say AMD has Intel's processors beat. I think Intel will pull a sufficient lead on AMD over the next 6 months.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I think it is very honorable (can't find a better word) that you are supporting your company, and I am fully aware that yes, given the choice, AMD will over-charge for their processors too -- BUT:
1) Intel's tactics, previously *and* recently, has not been too wise. one of the most important of this in RAMBUS: Intel basically said that (back in the first days when RAMBUS came out) we are going forward w/ RAMBUS. everyone knows that it's a M$-like move, everyone knows that it's b/c intel is getting a huge chunck of $$ from RAMBUS, and nobody liked it. Did Intel care? no; in fact, Intel stopped licensing VIA for making SDRAM / DDR chipsets; People like me looked around -- who is supporting DDR? well, AMD is...
2) Technically, Hammer makes more sense: sorry but from a user point of view (user as in programmer, IT admin, etc) -- Hammer makes like easier than IA-64; i mean, if you are gonna make such a drastic move away from IA32 (which, i admit, sucks bad), then do it slowly! What is the difference between migrating from IA-32 to IA-64 vs. say, alpha / solaris / whatever? not a whole lot -- pretty much everything needs to be redone. i mean, i still get the Intel sticker, but what's the difference there?
3) sorry but people has an tendency to cheer the under-dog; fact of life... i remember back then everyone cheered for NVIDIA when 3dfx was "king", now-a-days people still respects NVDA, but does not cheer for them anymore because they are now a status-quo -- they are expected to be one top -- but any move of the underdogs: ATI radeon / matrox paphelia (sp? heck, where they come up w/ this anyway) / Kryo(?) gets recognition. it's like a fight - will the new comer defeat the champion? we are geeks -- not much soap opera in our life, so this is the subsitute.
So... yes given the opportunity, would AMD do the same as Intel (rambus, etc)? maybe -- but i actually think AMD CEO is wiser than that -- he is a cool guy, btw -- visit any AMD facility and you can see his indiana-jones parody poster -- it's pretty cool. but we never know; but one thing is for sure -- if AMD ever gets on top, there will be probabbly a lot of cheer for intel for making attempts at the "de-throning"
last point, AMD is not TEXAS based. they are in SAN JOSE, CA. addr is something like 1 AMD lane or something.... get it straight people.
again, I would like to see your counter-arguments, if there are any. it's not fun writing without knowledge that there would be some reply.
-LQ
My life in the land of the rising sun.
But while temping at Intel I got the impression that AMD was no good, not even in giving Intel employees huge discounts on P3's (which at the time was their flagship product) - I even got into an argument with a technician who couldn't understand how AMD chips reduced the prices on Intel chips.
Not to mention such discussions were met with violent disagreement. If you said you had an AMD system in an interview you could kiss that job good bye.
I also got the impression talking to people that if Intel executives had this master button that said "get rid of amd" that no-one would even hesitate to push it. Despite the fact that AMD pushes Intel to move faster (and visa versa). Just compare all the time between the P90 (which I recall coming out in 92 and costing over 900$), PPro, and P2.
Why the worry?
There are geeks like me who have been screwed by intel's buggy processors (somewhere around here I have a 500$ P90 that has an fdiv bug in it - after much haggeling on the phone I never did get it replaced), and their high prices. But I still have Intel systems floating around here, as well as a few sparc, and a few amd machines.
AMD is the underdog - they made X86 compatible CPU's without reverse-engineering (yes its true! do the research), they made intel's cpu's for a very long time and I for one think its kinda neet that a company like AMD despite all the flack Intel has given them has made chips that perform comparibly with Intel's chips - which is probably why slashdotians favor them in discussion boards.
I am a long time system designer
Another reason why i tend to prefer Amd is the cynical marketing processor known as the P-4. The vast majority of benchmarks show that unless your running software thats heavily SSE-2 optimized, the Athlon's spank the P-4. Yet the P-4's are much more $$$$ due to all those wonderful Intel commercials with dancing morons in bunny suits, or some smucks painted up like a martian with a bad head cold. Instend of wasting all that money marketing, use it to improve your designs! Amd spends virtually nothing on marketing, and yet whenever they have a good design, their products sell extremely well. And dont get me started on intel's late ddr support, or the earily 845 chipsets that were sdram only, which had PATHETIC performace.
I guess the point of my whole rant is......I use Intel or Amd, or whoever, as long as they give me a good value for my (or my customer's) dollar. Give me a nice industry standard design. Dont foist some new marketing propierty design on me. If its gotta be propierty, it better be for one of two reasons: Considerably cheaper, or considerably faster. Intel in the past few years has NOT focused on giving the customer value. Amd has. Give me a 1000 dollars, and I can build either an Intel box, or an Amd box thats 20% faster then the Intel box, and just as stable. (I dont buy the Amd isnt stable arguement, it all comes down to knowing your hardware and how to configure it properly for stable operation.)
When Intel returns to delivering a product that is worth the price Intel charges for it, I'll use Intel again. Until then, I'll continue to laugh at ridiculous marketing schemes and do my research on which product is the fastest for the least money.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Bah, AMD DOMINATED the benchmarks from the advent of the athlon through the most recent set of P4's that just came out in april. Untill they gained the 800mhz advantage of the P4 2400, Intel got their ass handed to them by "just as good for cheaper" processors on a regular basis.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Ok, stupid idea... but what about doing this on the OS level, with a virtual machine available to run legacy code. AFAIK this is how users run MacOS9 apps under OSX.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
We've been using Abit kt7a and Kr7a. We are now getting Gigabyte Ga-7vrxp boards for the new systems.
For people looking for a more integrated design. I have been testing an MSI K7n420 for the last few days and it seems to be pretty good. It has onboard sound, nic, and video (Nforce chipset). It also has an AGP slot so you can upgrade the video later on (there is also a version without onboard video).
Later, Seeker
If we take two points of performance data, we
should be able to extropolate hammer performance
as far as PR rating.
So if we take the quake score listed and assume
that means a 800 mhz clawhammer is a 1600+ and
combine that with earlier projections that hammer
would be release on Q4 at about 2 Ghz as a 3400+,
that gives us the following:
y+ 800x = 1600
y+ 2000x = 3400
Solving the equations gives you:
y=400 x=1.5
So clawhammer mhz versus P4 mhz could be along
the lines of:
400 + 1.5 clawhammer mhz = P4 mhz
Because Intel went & built their P4 fab on illegaly expropiated land belonging to Palestinians ethnically cleansed from a village near Gaza .
& have made no offer to compensate those villagers even though as far as the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convenention, the IDHR & the UN are concerned, they (the former villagers) still own that land.
You're probably thinking of [someoneelse]'s Hardware (cough*tom*cough)...
To judge real-world performance, Quake is at least as good as any synthetic benchmark. Personally, I'd like to see benchmarks for 3DS MAX, TMPGEnc or Photoshop (because those are some of the programs I use daily). But between Quake and WhateverMark2002, I prefer Quake (and I don't even play Quake).
RMN
~~~
According to all the reports I've read around the 'net, this seems to be the most likely situation concerning AMD and Intel in the coming year:
Q2 2002: Amd is set to announce the "thoroughbred" AthlonXPs , at 2200+ (1.8GHz) and possibly up to 2500+ (2.0GHz). This seems to be confirmed by some European/Asian online vendors now listing these speed grade Athlons for pre-order.
Sometime later during 2002: Amd is set to discontinue the morgan (duron) CPU, and replace it with low speed AthlonXPs, under the Duron moniker.
Q4 2002: Amd paper launches Clawhammer, probably named as Athlon Pro64, as well as Sledgehammer, under the name Opteron. Both CPUs will be made at the Dresden FAB, using 130nm with SOI process and the metal die slug, and should have impressive thermal performance compared to the AthlonXP cpu. The Clawhammer cpu will possibly start at 1.6GHz-2.0GHz for a PR rating in the range of 3000+ to 3400+. This cpu will have an ondie 64bit DDR333 bus and memory controller. It will also feature Intel's SSE2 SIMD extensions, and utilize a 700ish pin socket (not certain as to exact pin count). As for Sledgehammer, this CPU will have the aforementioned features of the Clawhammer, but use a 900ish pin socket, and have a dual-channel (128bit effective) DDR333 memory controller. Due to the packaging complexity and the dual channel memory controller, this CPU should command a higher price than the Sledgehammer.
Amd is also releasing a new chipset with Hammer. The Amd8000 series chipset will include an AGP3.0 (AGP8X) "tunnel" as well as a PCI "tunnel" and a conventional southbridge "tunnel". The reason for this naming convention is that the Hammer bus is a point to point protocol, and that the conventional "northbridge" does not exist in this platform, as it's main purpose of serving as a RAM controller, is now taken by the Hammer cpu.
Expect the Hammer CPUs to not become widely available until Q3/Q4 2003.
Now, as for Intel...
October 2002: Intel is expected to launch the last of the P4 "northwood" cpu series processor steppings, at 2.8GHz, utilizing a 533MHz QDR bus, much like the new 2.26GHz and 2.53GHz P4s.
In early 2003, Intel should paper launch the "Prescott" Pentium 4, with widespread availability of this cpu no earlier than late early Q4. This cpu will utilize a 667MHz bus (166MHz quadpumped), and will be produced in 90nm process, using the metal slug that the current P4 is equipped with. This cpu will have "Prescott new instructions", possibly named SSE3, but otherwise known as Symmetric Multithreading. Basically, the cpu behaves as if it were 2 independant processors, and can execute different threads and instructions simultaneously (this is a very poor explanation of SMT I know).
"Prescott" will be paired with a new motherboard chipset, utilizing Dual channel DDR333 for an effective 5.3GHz/s bandwidth. As well, this chipset should support Serial ATA as well as USB2.0, and (possibly, unconfirmed as of yet) AGP3.0, aka AGP8x support.
Whew, that's pretty much all the info I have on the near future of Amd and Intel.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
IIRC, they do exist.t .asp?URL= / ibrary/backgrnd/html/awewindata.htm
I don't know about Linux, but I'm certain that some Unixes has those on 32bit.
For Windows, apperantly it has it from Win2K onward.
Here is the info I dug after a quick search:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defaul
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
I'll start this by saying YES, I work for Intel. Hate me...whatever.
We should we hate you? You don't even say what you do for Intel. Do you design processors? Do you clean the toilets? Do you work in marketing? Are you director of the Department of FUD? I have nothing against Intel, and I'm sure neither do most people here. But I do have a lot against the P4. It's a fraud. But that doesn't mean Intel can't make good products. Personally I'd love to have a Hammer system with an Intel chipset.
Last week Intel dropped the prices of its processors. AMD was forced to follow suit, dropping their prices about 2 days later. Did the Slashdot community cheer Intel?
Why should we? Intel CPUs are still more expensive, they are still slower and they still can't run in SMP (except for the Xeons, but those are priced in the "hilarious" range).
So along comes this news...AMD Opteron 800 MHz beats a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz by one frame pre second. I guess I fail to see why everyone is so excited?
How about... because it's faster while running at half the clock speed?
I'll wager ANYTHING that when it ships, a 800MHz Opteron will sell for at LEAST twice the price of a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz.
I'll wager anything that you'll never see an 800 MHz Opteron on sale. o_O
RMN
~~~
Always remember that you're dealing with people who are traditionally more concerned with showcasing their elite attitudes toward computing than providing information and/or a reasonable perspective.
Slashdot: News for nerds. Non-nerds be damned!
Er, AMD have *not* "left behind ancient software and hardware". DOS will still run fast on Hammer :-).
the ZX has a different chipset - the DX uses the AMD 760 'set. Idiots like Tom's Hardware will always recommend some flaky VIA chipset that benchmarks 0.1% faster or is $5 cheaper. God knows why.
That was classic intercourse!
I know IBM/Motorola haven't kept up in the MHz race, but I was under the impression that the PowerPC architecture was pretty nice and had plenty of headroom for growth.
Is that not true? Only IBM makes the 64-bit version, and only in thier pricy RS/6000's, but in theory at least...
As for the Alpha, I tried to port my application to Alpha when it first came out, and there was a problem. It seems the Alpha processor could not access memory at the byte level. All byte writes had to merge the byte in question into a 64-bit word to write back into memory. PowerPC has no such problem.
Not the worst thing in the world until you have an application that stores byte-aligned data in shared memory. Since I didn't want to have to use a mutex every time I accessed this shared memory area (which was constantly), I gave up on Alpha. Was I wrong?
-Rob
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
me: I swear! I didn't say anything! editors: We heard otherwise... me: I didn't say anything about a beowolf cluster! editors: But you were THINKING it! me: AHHHHHHHGGGGGGGG!!!
The ability to monopolize an industry is insignificant, next to the power of the source.
The point is, Quake is something people actually run (BTW, 60 fps? Even on my (poor old) Pentium III I find it hard to have less than 75...). A synthetic benchmark is just that. Good for testing individual aspects of the hardware, but not really useful in terms of judging how the CPU (or graphics card, or whatever) will perform in normal use.
As I said, I wish they'd run some 3DS MAX tests. Even with the "Intel optimizations" added in R4.26, most tasks are still faster on Athlons. With the improved FP units of the Hammer and support for SSE2, it should be very interesting indeed...
RMN
~~~
the p4 fan clips are worse. It takes me roughly 15 minuites to get the damn thing off every time I have to, it's rather annoying. They should have made it so there where simple open/close clips, not those ungodly self catching things.
I live in a giant bucket.
K5 was the first superscalar x86 processor. And it had extremely high IPC. However the resulting clock frequency was horribly slow, and the overall performance was bad as a result. Which just shows that ignoring frequency for the sake of IPC is as bad as ignoring IPC for frequency. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
Er, AMD have *not* "left behind ancient software and hardware". DOS will still run fast on Hammer :-).
"Nobody will ever need more than 18,446,744,073,709,551K of memory!"
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
That's EXACTLY what I meant! It means nothing and yet it's being reported everywhere that it kicks the p4's ass and everyone is beliving it. No one else in this thread has bothered to look at the test objectively and say "Wait a minute, why were these two things even compared?". But I did and got knocked down to 0 for it.
An as for what is says about "my" p4 is that yes, last years first gen P4 wasn't so hot. But this is NEW tech, it should have at least been compared to the latest p4 tech if it was going to be compared at all.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I had an ATI AIW Radeon 7500 and SB Audigy running on (what I think) is a generic board (Biostar...feel free to correct me if it is not generic.) I had an Athlon 800 (classic) being cooled with a 486 fan, running Windows XP, without any driver updates other than what came with the hardware. I didn't even have the VIA 4in1 drivers loaded. 128 Megs of ram. Even playing quake 3 at 90 FPS (not great, but I don't care) I never had a single hiccup out of this machine. Now that I think about it...I've never loaded the 4in1 drivers and had MB's from manufactuers across the board, never used Intel anything, and I've never had a problem in any of my systems. All ran rock solid.
I remember hearing that due to its tiny die size (104 square millimeters) Clawhammer would be a desktop/mobile part. If that's true, I can't wait to get a high-performance 64-bit notebook!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Is it just me, or could the rise of Linux (and thus open source software in general) make x86 significantly less important? On my system, there is only once piece of software (NVdriver) that isn't open source. Thus, in theory, it would be easy for me to move to another architecture with no more pain than simply recompiling my distro (which I'm doing ATM on my other machine anyway ;) Now, if only there were some cheap alternative arch chips that actually outperformed x86!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Now honestly, do you need a computer processor running at 2.5GHZ if all you are doing is typing on /. or surfing for p0rn?
>>>>>>>>>
Just wait until KDE 4 and GNOME 3 come out and ask that question again...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
ok so it handles 64 bit.. but to the averagce consumre (aka gamer) Biig woopdey do .. i mean it has to "back down" to 32 bit mode so i can play counterstrike and other games....
..
.. oh yea rember this baby? well how many games did you have to reboot to c64 emu bc they would not work in 128 mode? about 80-90% of em ... same thing will happen to the claw...
.. and heavy workload .. but i dont expect it to make sweepeing changes in the gaming industry... only way that would happen if intel also rose to the challenge and put out a comparable proccessor...
....
Games and software are writen: to the lowest common dinominator.. i'm not saying there wont be ports of some games to 64 bit but... come on
let me remind you of a presidence set many many years ago...
Commodore 128
She may be great for server
then most gamging companies would goahead and write for 64 bit
As I previously mentioned, Alpha was the most anal of RISC designs. RISC is all about minimizing cycles and maximizing number of operations executed -- even if they are simplified so you must do two, three or even more ops per typical CISC instruction. Data alignment is crucial to RISC performance -- especially in designs like the Alpha or 64-bit SPARC. No Alpha has 8 or 16-bit operations, just 32 or 64-bit. Even the original Alpha 21064 could NOT load/store 8 or 16-bit values, only 32 or 64-bit. They changed this in the 21164 and later after extensive requests, but not lightly. When A/V instructions were added, only 5 were added.
IBM-Moto had a design failure in their first 64-bit PowerPC 620. They had to chuck it and refocus -- resulting in a not so efficient/compatible 64-bit PowerPC from its 32-bit siblings. Of all the RISC designs, only Alpha was designed as a 64-bit processor from the get-go. I'm sure this is why the 32-bit PowerPC was "easier" to accomodate 8/16-bit loads/stores/operations than the 64-bit Alpha. At least until Intel IA-64, which introduced EPIC as a "successor" to RISC. But as Intel has found out, Itanium has fallen victim to all the "great ideal, poor reality" predictions Digital's Alpha ream made of it, almost to the letter. And even "McKinley" (now Itanium2) still cannot match a 3-year old Alpha 264 design at FPU.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
I use GNU/Linux and all of the important to useful software is free software and already portable to many other architectures. I think moving to a 64bit architecture sounds a nice plan over the next yeears. I expect that Linux and the gcc will support IA64 as well as x86-64 anyway, so what does the move to IA64 cost more than:
I don't know much about processor design, so please correct me, but i think IA32 compatibility is only interesting for those who use closed source software, that is not maintained anymore, and is just a needless load for others.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
The dual G4 1Ghz macs also have a L3 cache that might help with RC5 key cracking.
L3 isn't going to do squat for RC5 key cracking. RC5 key cracking is a VERY small algorithm that fits entirely into the L1 cache of a processor. It uses only a handful of instructions VERY often. Basically it comes down to how well a processor is optimized at one or two very specific instructions.
RC5 numbers tell you exactly ONE thing, how good the processor is at RC5 key cracking. It tells you exactly NOTHING about how good the chip will do anything else because no other code is at all like those d.net clients. It doesn't even relate at all to any other encryption type code. Similarly, Seti@Home isn't much better, since it basically just tests how good a chip is at doing FFTs, ie it tests how good a general purpose chip is at acting like a DSP. This might have a very minor relevance to things like AC'97 audio and stuff like that, but that takes such a tiny fraction of a modern CPU's processing power that it's not worth worrying about anyway.
Long story short, Quake 3 isn't a very good benchmark to compare chips with, but it's a hell of a lot better then RC5 numbers are. Unless you buy a computer for the sole purpose of getting a high score on d.net's stats page, RC5 numbers are pretty much worthless.
The case, which made national news on Tuesday, came up after police arrested a father of seven because he barked in public.
Trond S. Hansen, 57, was walking home from a dinner party in downtown Oslo with two of his children, ages nine and seven, in early May, according to the ruling.
Along the way the children quarreled and the youngest started crying. The father tried distract them by barking.
A witness who feared that a dog was mauling a child called police after looking out the window to find that it was actually a man barking, the ruling said.
Police arrested Hansen and charged him with disturbing the peace, public drunkenness and child neglect. They jailed him for the night and turned his children over to welfare authorities.
In court, police said Hansen smelled of alcohol and his speech was slurred. Another witness said he was not drunk and Hansen said his slurred speech was due to his false teeth coming loose.
The Oslo preliminary court found no evidence of drunkenness, neglect or illegal barking.
"The court finds it proven that the defendant barked in a public place at night. The court, however, is in doubt that the barking was so loud that it disturbed the peace," the ruling said.
The defendant was awarded 4,000 kroner (dlrs 500) in legal costs. Prosecutors admitted that the case should never have gone to court and did not plan to appeal.
"The whole thing seemed unreal," the man was quoted as telling the Oslo newspaper Aftenposten. "I feel like I've been subject to an abuse of power."
The ruling was released in late May but did not make news until now because of a journalists' strike.
Backward compatibility is an unfortunate fact of life. If it weren't we could have gone to flat address spaces 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these noisy and power-wasting AT-compatible cases, and it wouldn't be so hard to break away from Microsoft platforms and applications.
In point of fact, Intel didn't simply ignore backward compatibility with the Itanium. They just thought that they could build a processor powerful enough to maintain it through emulation.