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.

Comments

Linus's hammer support?!

[NicolaiBSD]

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.

Re:Linus's hammer support?!

[cperciva]

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.

I think you mean linux's paging problems. Specifically, the fact that gcc being broken means that linux uses 32 bits for fields which should be 64 bits.

IA-64 anyone?

[Critical_]

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.

Re:IA-64 anyone?

[rchatterjee]

Let's stick to our desire for innovation and truely stand behind the company willing to shed the baggage: Intel.

So where were you when the 64bit Alpha came out ten years ago?

It had nothing to do with x86 compatability and whooped on all x86 chips on every benchmark that was out there but its all but dead now.

And now you're saying a architecture that doesn't beat the current crop of x86 chips in performence, breaks compatabilty with the x86 architecture, and costs 10 times as much for similar capabilities will somehow succeed?

Once you break compatability with vast amount of software that is out there for x86 you're suddenly no better than all the other 64bit chips that have been out there.

Why go with a relatively untested IA-64 arch when i could go with a Sun, IBM, or SGI box who have all been 64bit for years and have no x86 baggage at all? I'm certanly not saving any money going with Intel's chip plus the other 64bit architectures have much more software support in compairason to IA-64.

As a customer if i buy IA-64 and it fails in the marketplace and support dries up, I'm left with a fairly useless box that can only run the few programs made specifically for IA-64 but if i buy x86-64 and it fails in the market i still have a very usable x86 machine and tons of 32bit software to work with.

SuSE's work on supporting the Hammer

[Roger Whittaker]

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)

64 bit versions of current tech misses the pont?

[shic]

my little site will finally be able to handle a good slashdotting with 16GB of DDR333

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:

1. 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.
2. 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 remember...

[AppyPappy]

16 gig???

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!!!