Mandrake To Support AMD's Hammer

ruiner writes "Mandrake has announced their intention to support AMD's Hammer with a 64 bit version optimized for the new CPU. Redhat is also rumored to be following Suse's lead. 'This new generation of AMD Athlon and AMD Opteron processors is extremely exciting. A version of Mandrake Linux dedicated to these powerful 64-bit processors can certainly accelerate MandrakeSoft's growing adoption in the Linux corporate market' said Jacques Le Marois, CEO of MandrakeSoft."

Comments

Suse?

[Spyky]

For those who don't know, because its very unclear from the article, Suse was the first (or at least before Mandrake) linux distro to announce Hammer support.

Check it out here

-Spyky

Re:MandrakeSoft cooperates with AMD to support x86

[Paul Jakma]

AMD Hammer/Opteron is completely IA32 (ie normal 32bit x86) compatible - all IA32 OSes boot on it, it has a standard IA32 BIOS, applications will run fine on it. If you run a x86-64 OS, then you will be able to run both 32bit and 64bit x86-64 software (side by side).

Ie x86-64 is:

- IA32 (8086 mode et al too - i /guess/)
- standard IA32 BIOS
- additional x86-64 mode

Apparently 32-bit Linux and Windows booted almost first time on early silicon, and they've had absolutely no 32bit compatibility problems - it all works. then it took just a week for AMD to get linux to boot into x86-64 mode (iirc from the talk linked below).

IA64 / Itanium on the other hand is a completely new architecture:

- completely different instruction set
- completely different ABI
- new weird "look it does everything" BIOS (EFI)
- IA32 is /emulated/ in silicon and hence slow

There's a good talk by an AMD engineer on the AMD Hammer arch. given at the recent kernel summit at:

http://ksmp3rep.sf.net/KSMP3s/amd64.mp3

found amongst other kernel summit talks at:

http://linuxkernel.foundries.sourceforge.net/artic le.pl?sid=02/06/26/0116225