AMD's 64-bit Plot

ceebABC writes "In a long interview with eWEEK, AMD's CEO Hector de Ruiz talks about struggling to compete with Intel, but more importantly about their upcoming 64-bit processors. He says that AMD's 64-bit chips will be comparatively priced to the 32-bit ones, and backwards compatible. He also thinks there will be a market for desktop 64-bit systems. Skip to the last page for the most interesting stuff."

Comments

Hmm

[zapfie]

Is there really much consumer (not business) application for 64-bit processors? If so, where would desktop computing benefit?

Re:Hmm

[rodgerd]

Desktop video is one that springs to mind - lotsa memory.

I can buy PC133 @ US$60 per half gig. For US$500, I can fill the address space of the 32 bit processor, yet a non-trivial home movie could occupy more than 4 GB in uncompressed form.

Heat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the processors run cooler than the current 32 bit offerings from AMD?

As much as I love AMD, my box is far too loud, and I'm too damned cheap to shell out another $100 for decently quiet fans.

Re:Big Bets on Table

[nelsonal]

The only itanium2's avalable are hp's offerings (I think its the rp2600 and rp5670), they have a two way and four way that should have been shipping since August. Considering that HP is the co-developer and only one selling them, might tell you something. Although there have been rumblings that IBM and Dell will be adopting the architecture. I think Dell is waiting for a better chipset from someone besides HP. It seems like AMD is trying hard to move into the low end server business with these, but planning to sell a cut rate model to consumers to help cover their development costs.

Will This be Linux's first killer app?

[peripatetic_bum]

Just wondering, if Linux already runs on 64bit, which I think it does, and I have not heard of microsoft having anything ready for this market, does this mean that just as gamer's buying games pushed the video card (and in my opinion, the os) market, will we see linux be increasing adopted since it will run 64bit and MS does not?
Just a question.
Thanks for the replies

Over 10 years after DEC introduced Alpha ....

[Bio]

I'm amazed to read the discussion, wether or not 64 bit will succeed over 32 bit processors.

This is 10 years after DEC has introduced the Alpha Architecture (in spring 1992).

The Alpha was fun to work with, not only because of it's 64 bit architecture, but because of the clean orthogonal instruction set and it's outstanding performance.

Rest in peace ...

Re:Over 10 years after DEC introduced Alpha ....

[Door-opening Fascist]

One thing to remember is that the Alpha was not the first 64-bit processor. Before it were HP's PA-RISC in 1986, U. of Tokyo's TRON design in 1987, and DEC's MIPS R4000 in 1991. Sun/Fujitsu moved the SPARC to 64 bits in late 1992, and IBM was late when it moved the POWER in 1995. So 64-bit processors were neither unheard-of nor new in 1992.

re: Skip to the last page for the most interesting

[bogie]

No this is the interesting stuff

"eWEEK: What does it mean to you personally, though, when a Gateway or an IBM not just stop, but announce that they'll no longer be offering AMD as an option?

Ruiz: I think it's terrible, obviously. It's terrible. I think if you were to talk with Ted Waitt at Gateway, and ask him, "Why'd you do that?" and if he would really tell you why, it's a question of he's being bribed to do it. Now, he's got to look out for his own hide and the company that's probably in great difficulty has got to listen to the huge amounts of money that can help him do that.

But you know what I find amazing, think about the power, is that despite all that, which obviously we really get emotional about the fact that somebody like Gateway gets bribed into doing that, is that despite that, according to Dataquest last week, we're still holding a 19 percent share of the market. That to me tells me we're in the throes of breaking this open"

Hey Intel, see you in court! Of course now that Intel is along with Microsoft backing a group to outlaw opensource in the government, I think its time for the opensource community to boycott Intel. Why should our money go to a company which is now attempting to hurt Linux and opensource? I know because these recent actions, I will NEVER buy Intel ever again!

Remember the Alpha

[chunkwhite86]

I see many posts here wondering about porting Linux to 64 bit...

Remember the Alpha? 64 bit goodness all the way. Has been running Linux for years.

And for those old enough to remember... Microsoft did support Win NT on the Alpha just a few years ago.

As far as the software goes, both Linux and Microsoft are ready for 64 bit computing.

Re:What desktop users want to know..

[Jeff DeMaagd]

A system starts to "feel" faster when it is about twice as fast. You won't get your work done any faster, but it is a much more reactive and enjoyable machine to work with.

If CPU performance is the _only_ differentiator, maybe. Back in the PII days, I had a 166MHz Alpha (21066) for a personal machine and at work, a PII, 300MHz, both systems ran Windows NT 4.0.

In just about every way, the PII was supposed to be two times or more times better, but the Alpha system actually felt "snappier", despite the computation performance and bandwidth of the PII being tested as 2x faster.

They still do

[ArchieBunker]

Talk to the right people and you'll find a beta of win2k server for the alpha cpu. At the time neither intel or AMD had a ready for prime time cpu and MS needed to keep a working 64 bit codebase.

Re:What desktop users want to know..

[Dave_bsr]

Dave_bsr's Law: Governing "when computers will be fast enough":

Computers will be fast enough, when, for every conceivable operation, system delay between user requests and proper system response is less than the human ability to resolve, eg, instantaneous.

Not instantaneous, as in .05 seconds (button click speed now now), no, I mean _instantaneous_, like when I push on my door and I see movement. When I write on paper and _instantly_ there is writing. Then, computers will be fast enough. And I don't just mean speed for mozilla, i mean processing real-time 3d bump-mapped, whooseyourdaddy environments. Yeah.

There is no "desktop" market for 64 bit CPUs

[ppetrakis]

I don't have to read the article. I've been working with Alphas all my life. There is nothing for 99.9% of the applications you use everyday that could benefit from running itself in a 64 bit address space. Unless you get a signifigant performace boost from the move (like Alpha in it's heyday) it isn't worth the effort.

If you find you need that sort of mega addressing the chances are the app you need already runs on 64 bit Solaris. After that point it's up to the vendor (Think Avanti Corp /Apollo) Wheither it's worth their while. Remember, You need their application. Unless your app is home grown or you have some signifigant pull with a vendor the port isn't going to happen.

The desktop is an afterthought. This chip was designed to be sold in quanties of 8 and higher in single large servers. Once they cut into that market the economies of scale just happen to make it cheap enough for the desktop market to pick it up. They have a much better chance at getting it down with their builtin backwards compatibility and keeping costs down. Alpha never hit that "sweet spot" for the volume to really bring down the price..

Now, Don't think Intel is going to sit on its hands while AMD eats their lunch. They're more likely to drop an Itanium instruction decoder into an Alpha EV7 core and push that than follow with an x86-64 processor line. Itanium is just to big and costs too much to at this stage of development to make inroads fast enough stop AMD in gaining marketshare but more importantly, mindshare. Intel would never take up x86-64, Doing so admits defeat to the industry i.e. You're not the leader anymore.

So to sum it up, Intel will either:

1. release Itanium and we all find out it isn't as slow as everyone claims it is or as expensive
2. See Alpha/Itanium hybrid core above
3. They bring back Alpha (maybe not by name) and put it under a modern process. Expect atleast x1.5 current clock speeds and Alpha's can milk rambus for all it's worth

2 and 3 are much more likely than one, You know which one I'd rather see happen :).

Either way it'll be a boon for the OS community and certainly make our (The Alpha community) lives easier. The way I see it, even if hammer is moderatly successfull. You guys will 'clean' most of the popular soucecode out there to be 64 bit clean, reducing our matainence work by like 80%. The only thing we'll have to worry about is firmware, toolchain, libc, Xwindows, and kernel. So please buy a *hammer and learn the joys of porting to 64 bits. If it proves too painfull, please see the ld manpage for the "-taso" flag :).

Peter

is M$ quiet about anything?

[twitter]

MS have been quietly getting ready for 64 bit for at least 2 years; they've been shipping a 64 bit SDK on my MSDN disks for over a year. There are 64 bit NVidia drivers for WinXP-64. What makes you think MS isn't already there?

Spare me the smoke and vapor. Don't you remember the sad story of Mica, errr, NT on Alpha? Loudly proclaimed, quietly killed, that's why I think they are not there. If you consider the number of bugs and holes in 32bit M$ work, you might conclude they never arived anywhere.

In the mean time, you can get Linux and BSD on Alpha and other 64 bit platoforms:

• Debian
  
• Red Hat
  
• BSDs, free, net, open
  
• and plenty of others less well known.
  

Oh, it hurts so much to remember and think!

Re:32-bit compatible = a temporary half-solution

[Ninja Programmer]

Yes, but several development houses (including, primarily Microsoft) have had experience porting to other 64 bit architectures. So the problems are known and addressable.

• The problems to be hurdled are:
  1) Reliance on the fact that size of pointer is equal to size of int.

True. But this is really a bad code practice sort of thing that developers that the C/C++ standard doesn't endorse anyhow. Java developers need not be concerned.

• 2) Reliance on a particular byte order in the machine word.

Its little endian, like it has always been on Intel. What's the problem? Little endian has the natural LSB/W/D property that makes increasing the natural word size typically a non-issue (unlike big endian where it is a serious PITA.)

• 3) Using type long and presuming that it always has the same size as int.

It is the same. You need to use "long long", or "_int64" or something like that to move to 64 bits in your C/C++ compiler. AMD's new "long mode" actually defaults to 32 bit data sizes, and only uses 64 bits when specifically overridden to do so. That's the whole point of the x86 architecture -- it supports a variety of data sizes as a consequence of its long history of backward compatibility, not just one (like a typical RISC.)

• 4) Alignment of stack variables.
  5) Different alignment rules in structures and classes.

Same as it has always been. (64 bit integers already exist today in known common ABIs/compilers, in case you were unaware.)

• 6) Pointer arithmetic.

Eh? You can add/subtract integers to pointers, and subtract two pointers from each other. How does moving to 64 bits change anything?

Re:What desktop users want to know..

[bfree]

I think the sort of latency you see from current "realtime" audio systems is about right to meet my demands, <2ms! When we can have our computer provide a simulated environment at the compexity of modern physics in which we can shoot at our friends driving F1 cars while impregentating our girlfriend, all modeled indistinguisably from real life (could we ever model the creation of a human life meaningfully). That should keep us going for a few years but it will give scientists an incredible toy!
With up to 10^81 (2^273) atoms in the universe and then what level of subatomic detail? 512bit seems about right to me. Pity Moore's Law suggests we might have to wait til around 2674 til /. will be covered with questions over whether 512bit really is enough, with processor speeds of 3 Peta9Hz (thats 3 + 9 * 000,000,000,000,000). Who would want a beowolf cluster of those? Whose going to supply the power!
Unfortuantely anyone who reads this today will be lucky to see a nice 128bit computer in 96 years time at 1.5MegaPetaHz :-(

Order of magnitude.

[Inoshiro]

Let's say I have a 16,000 by 16,000 image frame. I have 60 of them per second, and have 2 hours of film. That works out to 100.5 terabytes of data. 2^64 happens to let me store and address about 166,937 of these superduperHD movies.

Now, I don't know about you, but I only own a couple-hundred movies, and I only own a couple-hundred games. Even if they were the mega, mega high res I mention above, I'd still not use up more than a miniscule fraction of what I had available. That's why I think it'll last at least a century.