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Red Hat Reveals Support For AMD's Hammer
Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat had been rumored to be working on support AMD's Hammer architecture, and now they have made it official. Now if I can get a hold of one of these my little site will finally be able to handle a good slashdotting with 16GB of DDR333! 'Red Hat will provide native 64-bit support for processors based on AMD's x86-64 technology, while providing support for existing 32-bit Linux-based applications.'" Combine this with Linus' feelings and Hammer is looking better and better.
Doh! Linus doesn't have warm fuzzy feelings towards the Hammer, or rather he's never expressed them. The poster is referring to a post on LKML on paging issues with Itanium.
Linus didn't endorse one platform or the other, he only explained that if Hammer was to become dominant instead of Itanium, it would save the kernel developers problems solving the Itanium paging problems.
Now if I can get a hold of one of these my little site will finally be able to handle a good slashdotting with 16GB of DDR333!
;)
Just as long as you lose that 14.4 modem you are hosting off.
Replacing your commodore 64 is just a start
Moderate this as a flame if you want cause I am sick and tired of this x86-64 bullcrap.
Lets see, the history of slashdot and most of computer-geekdom has always ribbed Intel for maintaining backwards compatibility with processors more than a decade old. Sure, x86 is great due to all the applications out for it, but in all honesty why can't we move away from it?
With Slashdot, Linus and most of the online review sites pushing for x86-64, one has to wonder if AMD is slipping cash under the table to all these parties. If not, then what happened to those people who wanted innovation in the releam of processors and just not cheap hacks upon hacks upon hacks? It's kinda funny but the way AMD is going is sorta the way Microsoft is: maintain backward compatibility at all costs.
My guess is that most people pushing x86-64 have yet to write a program more complicated than "hello world!". Let's stick to our desire for innovation and truely stand behind the company willing to shed the baggage: Intel.
Press releases detailing SuSE's work on Linux for the Hammer can be found here (20th March 2002), here (28th February 2002) and here (31st January 2001).
Roger Whittaker (SuSE Linux Ltd)
Hmmm. I'm probably more interested than most in the prospects of large address spaces, however I don't imagine typical web sites are where this technology will be best exploited. Think seriously, moving to 8 byte addresses has the following effects:
- Massively expanding address space and hence (for the first time - IMHO) making the holy grail of direct manipulation of persistent data structures a realistic proposition.
- Expanding the size of today's simple data structures. Consider, for example, a simple bi-directional linked list of 32-bit integers using a forwards and backwards pointer. A 32 bit arch has a 200% overhead, but 64 bit ach has 400% which should somewhat diminish expectations for magical performance!
Don't get me wrong. I think 64 bit is likely to be at least as important a step as 32 bit was c. 20 years ago, however I don't expect more than a small niche for such systems until resource allocation is re-thought.I can't help but feel that "real" manager's will just say Itanium plus winXP despite the advantages of Hammer and RedHat
AMD has almost constantly succeeded to deliver technically better hardware for a lower price. Given the current economic downturn (blabla) and the lessons learned in the dotcom meltdown (e.g. that image is not everything) even your average modestly intelligent manager type will perhaps chose the cheaper, better product. Besides, I don't think AMD is still viewed as that kind of an underdog anymore! And Linux on the server front looks good, too. So I think the chances are good.
Another issue is of course whether an 64+ bit addressing architecture is needed for mainstream PCs yet. But as we all know: it's not whether you need it - it's whether the industry thinks you need it!
Remember this, year 1992?
"Digital Equipment unveils the 150-MHz Alpha 21064 64-bit microprocessor". That was kind of one checkpoint, this year, I believe might be another.
My thoughts were the same when 32bit came in, until I relealised.
The new insturusction and architecture improvements in 32bit x86 made for a good performance overhead.
The memory bus was twice wide on a 32bit system , so the pointers on the linked list may have been twice the size but becuase of the wider bus there was no performance hit.
One of the create benifits of 32bit was that you could have numbers +-64000 in one register, giving the greatest performance increase.
The extra wide bus is gonig to give some performance gains on 64Bit systems, but I don't see the extra address space or larger numbers being that benifitial.. Well maybe the extra address space will help with threading and process management, and mean that bloatware can be even more bloated.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Anonymous Coward writes: Now if I can get a hold of one of these my little site will finally be able to handle a good slashdotting with 16GB of DDR333!
/. you need one of those just to keep up!
Not only that Anonymous Coward, but with the amount of posts you make to
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
I remember when 48K was considered overkill because you couldn't fill it
I remember when 360k was enough for software and data
I remember when I got a 20 meg hd for my XT "just in case"
I remember when I didn't wear these damn Depends. NURSE!!!
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
SuSE made the 64-bit hammer patch and submitted it to the gcc group a long, long time ago. 'Course, no one cares because it was SuSE and not Red Hat or debian. *scowl*
According to a recent press-release, MandrakeSoft has also worked with AMD to get Hammer supported on early 2003.
The joint Press release (MandrakeSoft/AMD- June 27th) is available here.
Here's what AMD is really thinking
Come on, people, really. Don't support AMD. They are not the noble David against the nasty Goliath. They are just as much a nasty Goliath themself, except for the fact that they don't have much market share... But they sure are acting like they do. If AMD and Intel keep pushing their 'Trusted Computing' wheelbarrow, I swear I will buy an underpowered Transmetta or even a fucking Macintosh just to avoid Palladium.
> On the SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks, the two fastest
> boxes are 1ghz I2s
That's only true because of Itanium 2's floating-point performance. Real server workloads don't use floating point. For a slightly more realistic workload, look at the SPEC CINT numbers. There, the 1GHz Itanium 2 falls behind 2.4GHz Pentium 4s and Xeons.
Furthermore, none of these SPEC bencharks are nearly as memory-intensive as real server workloads. That's where Itanium really gets Hammered.