AMD Releases Hammer documentation

Jonathan Graham writes: "Last Thursday AMD posted the five volume architectural manual to their new x86-64 processor on their website. The tomes are as follows: Application Programming, System Programming,General Purpose and System Instructions,128-bit Media Instructions and 64-bit Media and x87 Floating Point Instructions. Gentlemen...start your compilers! (or start writing them!)"

Comments

What a waste

[Demona]

gcc for Linux has those -i486, 586 and 686 flags, but no -amd flag, so it would seem that your spiffy Duron or Athlon doesn't take advantage of any of the chip's special features, essentially running it like a dumb fast legacy chip. That ain't my idea of efficiency. How many years did it take for the Pentium optimizations to make their way from an IBM lab into egcs and finally the mainstream gcc? By that time, AMD's were selling like hotcakes, especially among the build-your-own crowd. And this was when the dot com bubble was still growing, so it's a real shame AMD didn't stick a few developers on the necessary gcc work for that platform -- now that they're currently releasing the XP's and working on Hammer while phasing out Durons, the timing would have been perfect to release what they had for the older chips and work with the community on integrating it.

But as the roommate said, if you bothered trying to optimize your software for PC hardware it'll take you at least a year or two, by which time the hardware will be 'hopelessly outdated'. In the meantime, we get laptops that are nothing more than gigahertz crotch-warmers and desktops that are 2 gigahertz room-warmers, effectively dropping jet engines into lawnmowers and seeing a lot of energy diappear into a black hole called FALSE PROGRESS.

Re:What a waste

[Demona]

Obviously, I wasn't aware of that, or I wouldn't have said what I said. I stand corrected. However, I use Debian, and a whole lot of other Linuxes, and BSD, and Windows, and other OS's where appropriate, so your attempt at being witty comes across as dismissive, juvenile and rude. Big fat surprise, eh? I'll just invoke Godwin's Law now and note that if Hitler used Linux, the Slashbots would have helped write software to send Jews to the gas chambers...

Re:What a waste

[leviramsey]

My apologies for the gratuitous distro flame. Many/most of the debian users I talk to (especially those who are still running potato), when I start talking about how great the latest GNOME/KDE/mozilla/XFree/kernel versions are essentially take the attitude of "so what, kernel 2.2.17 is working fine for me." From this, I deduce that debian users don't necessarily care about having the latest versions of software. I'm not knocking this mindset, but the vaunted stability of Debian has its counterpoints, and this is one of them. OTOH, I run Mandrake's development branch (Cooker being somewhere between Sid and Sarge), and get the latest and greatest (or only a few steps from the edge) versions and damn fine stability to boot... diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

Re:What a waste

[Demona]

My thoughts precisely, and thanks for your clarification and gracious apology. My first thought on hearing mention of gcc3.2 was, "How many distros use it as default?" I know Gentoo's working on it for their next version, but they're already notorious for being bleeding-edge. As you see, for both my personal use and in various work settings I prefer a mix of current, recent and older software; but of course there are tons of institutions out there who move far slower, and rely far more heavily on things staying the same. (Witness the infinite COBOL, mainframe and assorted other discussions that always come up when someone assumes that history started with the PC...) As you say, the right tool for the right job.

More to the point, now that I know about -march for Athlons, I'll search it out and give it a try on a test machine. Thanks for the information.

Re:What a waste

[Chexsum]

Debian has all that and moron^H^He.

I run the testing distribution of Debian (sarge) which is alot more stable than cooker although I do like the Mandrake distribution and would run it if I had a machine capable of running it.

I run XFree86-4.2, Mozilla *a few different versions*, GNOME2, Galeon2 and plenty of other packages which Mandrake users read about. I run all this on a AMD k6-II 300/256M POS and occasionally on a P100/32M.

NB. Dont talk nonsense.

Virtualization?

[phr2]

I looked at the table of contents for the system programming manual and don't see any features for supporting self-virtualization beyond what's in the Pentium etc. I wonder what kinds of hoops it will take to make something like Plex86 virtualize the 86-64. I wish they'd add some hardware virtualization features since with these big processors, running multiple 'partitions' becomes more and more important.

I also notice that cycle counts aren't specified for the fancier arithmetic instructions like MUL and the multimedia instructions. Those make a big difference in the performance of graphics and signal processing applications including audio compression and so forth. So I guess we'll have to wait to see benchmarks.

Re:Old news.

[Phosphor3k]

Guess I should have hit the links first. Didnt realize they link to pdfs. If you go to amds order page, you can get any documentation they offer (so they say) in book form, for free.Here's a link to the x86-64 5 volume order page:

http://sausmaps.amd.com/AMDeMA/www/cpg_tech_manu al_order_form.jsp

Personally, I perfer my documentation in book, not electronic form.

Re:Sheer sexism

[oliverthered]

Ok seeing as you failed your English (like me)...

him/man is the indefinite neuter
her/she is the definite neuter.

Gentlemen is correctish just like
Fire man, post man, She's your man, There are twelve men in the all woman team. take you men...

America and her army,
She sailed today (referring to a ship).
She's a beauty....