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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."
Both Intel and AMD have been betting big on 64 bit computing and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Itanium 1 was a flop. Itanium 2 has respectable performance, but is not IA-32 backward compatible, where AMD x86-64 is backward compatible.
I will bet that backward compatibility will tilt the balance to Opteron and that Intel will scramble to introduce a new chip Yamhill(?) designed to provide the backward compatibility that IA64 lacks.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I love that everyone read that story and thought it ment that they were leaving the desktop market, when it really said that they were going to diversify outside of the desktop market, as in do more in addition to their desktop market...
...")
(a quote from first paragraph of the Forbes article "[a] strategy of developing processors for a wider range of products outside computers
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
At first they will be expensive, then they will be in the $599 desktops. Why wouldn't you use them?
For almost anyone out there, it's the only factor when buying a CPU: speed!
Nope. These days it's price. You can barely, oh so barely, tell the difference between 866MHz and 2.4GHZ, and only then when running certain high-end games or 3D modelling packages. Now go over to Dell's site and price a 2.4GHz system. You can easily get something with 256MB and no monitor for US$800. Now upgrade to a 3.06GHz P4. How much does that does that 27% increase in clockspeed cost you? Just over US$1000. And what does it get you? Remembering that clockspeed does not translate directly to more CPU performance, maybe you're getting a 20% across the board improvement, but _man_ are you paying for it, both in cost and power consumption. And was it worth it, for 27% faster than "more speed than I know what to do with?" Probably not (though I realize that all hardware site weenies will absolutely insist that they can feel the difference when browsing the web on such a machine).
If you have a 64-bit 2 GHz processor and a 32-bit 2 GHz processor, the 64-bit processor is going to be much faster. This speeds up the whole system, not just the rate at which you make giblets fly.
Ehrmm. no, if it were that easy we would all be using 64bit by now. 64bit has historically been faster because they belong to a better group of architectures called RISC, the new AMD 64-bit will be faster not because they have more bits but because AMD has upgraded the architecture and added more registers.
The number of bits is a meaningless as counting the number of seats in a car, twice as many seats doesnt make a faster car. In fact it makes the car harder to design to be fast, so does 64bit processors.
It's not about what consumer needs 64 bit for today's applications... it's tomorrow's applications. First there must be a base of users out there.
Do you remember the opportunity brought about by the 386? Who needed that when all the modern applications ran fine with the 286? The 386 even broke some of the old 286 code. But it was still very useful to programmers who could spend focusing on quality (and bloat?) rather than worrying about how to confine data to 64 K blocks. Almost 20 years later we are still benefitting from the whole flat memory model that finally came to x86 (flat up to 4 GB, that is).
If you have to ask the question of who needs it, then it's not you... yet. Sure the first adopters are the Corporate people who know they need it as well as the "look what I have" crowd. But I'm pretty sure that there will be consumer applications that will make 64 bits necessary after there is enough consumers that have them.
640 TB should be enough for anybody.
If you have a 64-bit 2 GHz processor and a 32-bit 2 GHz processor, the 64-bit processor is going to be much faster. This speeds up the whole system, not just the rate at which you make giblets fly.
No. That's a myth. As it stands, Pentiums for many years now have sported 64 bit buses and 64-bit FPUs (well, 80-bit CPUS actually), so we're not talking about bus size and FPU width. We're talking about:
1. All addresses being 64-bits.
2. All internal integer registers being 64-bits.
For #1, realize that this is going to greatly increase the data size of many applications. The larger the data size, the higher the chance of cache misses. In general, this is a loss, not a win.
For #2, realize that some integer operations are O(N) where N is the number of bits involved. 64-bit multiplication and division are slower than the same 32-bit operations. Period.
The gain with 64-bit processors is one of address space and nothing more.
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?
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
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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!
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"Grandma and grampa checking their email won't need something that fast and even the normal computer user will never experience such CPU intensive work to need a larger word size."
That's a bit of a narrow minded view, don'tcha think? Consider this: We don't know what we'll be doing with computers 2-3 years from now. If it turns out that PVRs are a killer App, for example, then suddenly 64-bit processors are interesting.
The "who really needs it for the most basic stuff?" argument is extremely tired. Lots of people buy their machines based on their potential, not what they can do with them today. Don't believe me? Then look at all the people who bought an XBOX solely because of it's chipset and hard drive. They were (and are today) expecting to eventually buy games that blow them away.
If computers were strictly used for their most basic features (internet browsing, email, etc...) then 'internet appliances' would have been some sort of hit as opposed to the flop that they are. So please, put this 'how do I get my grandma to buy one?' argument to rest. The answer is she won't. But there is still a large market of people who do want/need 64-bit processing. You don't need for grandma to want one in order for the product to be a success.
Have you ever done a physics engine? When you are working with vectors, you want as much precission as you can get. More precission means more bits.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Increased maximum memory helps.
Opteron's extra registers help.
64-bit calculations are easier, they don't have to be put into multiple 32-bit parts.
So...a 32-person bus is just as good as a 64-person bus? It may be harder to design and build, but when you have to move >32 people it's nice to have that big of a bus running around.
What I'm saying is, being 64-bit DOES make you faster. Not twice as fast, but definately faster and more powerful.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
"2^64 is certainly enough for at least a hundred years"
Famous last words?
My other sig is funny!
2^64 addressing is not the only benefit of the change. FPUs see additional benefit when they have more bits. More bits means more precission; this is very important and desirable, especially when working with numbers that have fractional components. For proper 3D rendering, physics models, and anything else that involves computing numbers that have fractional parts, more is better. When the FPU can handle a double in one clock cycle because it works natively on 64-bit IEEE floating point numbers, you will notice a performance boost in addition to the increased accuracy.
Um, all current x86s already handle 64-bit IEEE double-precision floats natively (actually more like 80 bits, for "extended double-precision"). The FP register file has been this wide for quite a while.
There will be no performance or precision boost for floating-point math from moving the rest of the chip to 64-bit registers/datapaths.
Perhaps, what I'm asking is, can anybody compare and contrast the two architectures; is there a certain advantage to one or the other?
Yah - AMD will offer it to the consumer combined with motherboards from tier-1 manufacturers like Asus, Abit, IWill, Tyan, and so forth, all at an attractive price (read: the same price as the Athalon XP CPUs).
Intel, on the other hand, will keep their 64 bit CPUs out of the consumer hands by pricing them above what most consumers are willing to pay, thus reaping a premium on them by selling them in servers through Dell and IBM (making even more money on cases and motherboards). There will be limited support for the CPU outside Intel's own motherboard offerings, and if you run with a hard-drive, video card, CD-Rom that has not been explicitly approved by Intel, then forget support (we've had this problem with Intel on some of their server motherboards).
Intel is taking the Cathedral approach, and AMD a Bazaar approach.
You can barely, oh so barely, tell the difference between 866MHz and 2.4GHZ, and only then when running certain high-end games or 3D modelling packages.
Sorry. Wrong. I went from a 1Ghz Athlon to an 1850Mhz AthlonXP. I use Windows XP. Programs opened faster. And when you're talking about Mozilla, or Office, or Photoshop, or Dreamweaver, or anything more complicated than notepad, really, you DO notice this. Especially when you're opening and closing programs all day long.
When I come across a webpage designed with complex tables and CSS elements, the speed improvement is noticeable (e.g. my banking website, which I frequent, is complex and now renders much faster).
You can never have enough speed. You will always notice a difference, eventually, because the more power that becomes available, the more complex things become that we use frequently.
And believe it or not, but many people like to play new games. Not just "gamers." Regular people, too. My dad can barely turn around in Quake, but he loves wandering around in god mode and shooting things. He wants to play Doom3 when it comes out. He will need new hardware.
I'm just sick of this lame argument that people aren't interested in new processors because they can't tell the difference between 800Mhz and 2Ghz. Bullshit. They might be able to LIVE with the difference in speed, especially if money is tight, but you can never have "too much" speed.
"And like that
For #1, realize that this is going to greatly increase the data size of many applications. The larger the data size, the higher the chance of cache misses. In general, this is a loss, not a win.
wouldn't the chance of cache misses depend on the caching policy? How does the data size matter?
Data size matters because a program will typically access a fixed number of working variables, not a fixed amount of data. If a program's working set size stays at, say, 1000 words, and you move from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture, you need a cache with twice as much storage space to hold the working set without thrashing.
There's easily enough die area to double the sizes of the L1 and L2 caches; the problem is that it slows down cache access (more latency cycles fetching something from L1 is a Bad Thing).
Certain types of load work with constant size instead of constant word count, but most of those deal with working sets large enough that you'll thrash no matter what.
The gain with 64-bit processors is one of address space and nothing more.
Which includes better behaviour for those programs that have to fake larger address space. That would be a speed increase.
Nothing running on x86 will do that. Unless you're running old DOS programs in real mode, you're already working with a flat address space. Typically 2 gigs of this is available to user programs (with the rest being mapped to kernel or device space). If you have a problem with a working set larger than 2 gigabytes, you already have a Sun/$other_vendor machine to solve it on.
Larger address space targets the _future_ problem of desktop users who want many gigabytes of memory.
A fringe benefit is being able to more efficiently map multi-gigabyte files into memory space, but performance for this kind of task is limited by disk latency and controller bandwidth, not memory architecture.
That's the biggest bunch of crap that I've ever heard. There are a bunch of games that do fixed point math because floating point does not give you enough accuracy.
Collision detection would certainly benefit from improved precision. Physics suck in games because it is difficult to do fast and accurate at the same time.
Epic has promised a 64bit version of games. I'm guessing they are doing so for a very good reason. And they are doing this despite the fact that they use a comparitively very robust physics engine in Karma.
I'm guessing you've never implemented a physics engine or even taken a Numerical Analysis course or read any books. So how about pulling your head out of your ass before disseminating FUD.
Dave_bsr's Law: Governing "when computers will be fast enough":
.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.
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
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
32 bit architectures are not limited to 4 gigabytes of memory. "32 bit processor" refers to the width of the DATA bus (and registers). It does not refer to the width of the address bus.
For example, the z80 and 6502 were 8-bit processors, but they supported more than 256 bytes of RAM (2^8 bytes). The 68000 and 80286 were 16-bit processors, but they supported more than 64k of RAM (2^16 bytes). That's because the 8-bit processors had 16-bit address busses, and the 16-bit processors often had 24-bit address busses.
The current pentium-4 Xeon chip supports 64 gig of RAM, despite being a 32-bit processor.
64-bit computing means that you can hold a 64-bit quantity (long int or double) in a register. Also, you can load, store, or perform arithmetic on such quantities using one instruction and often in one clock cycle.
This offers very few benefits for the end consumer. Mostly it's about perception: consumers will percieve that a 64-bit chip is twice as good as a 32-bit one.
That's not exactly accurate. A 64 bit processor has a large data pathway, and is more comparable to a roadway than a car. The cars are the data, and a 64-bit roadway has twice the space for cars (data) on it, which is where the extra speed is. But I do agree with you otherwise.
- 1. All addresses being 64-bits.
This is incorrect. The Hammer "long mode" uses 32 bits as the default data size. 64 bits are only used for pointers and explicitely overridden 64 bit operands. I.e., you still have to declare "long long" or "int64" or whatever, in your languages to access those 64 bits. All your old 32-bit data still occupies the same space.For #1, realize that this is going to greatly increase the data size of many applications. The larger the data size, the higher the chance of cache misses. In general, this is a loss, not a win.
Furthermore, measurements by AMD indicate that op-code size did not increase with the expanded instructions, but actual *decreased* because the additional registers decreased the typical amount of spill/fill code emitted.
Therefore there is no additional cache pressure. The "code bloat" problem remains solely in the hands of the software developer, and is *NOT* worsened in any way by hammer.
- 2. All internal integer registers being 64-bits.
This is also incorrect. There are numerous well known techniques used in ALU design that makes precious few operations "O(bits)". Again, AMD specifically targetted this. For example: the 64-bit integer multiply in hammer is *FASTER* (per clock) than the 32-bit integer multiply in either the Athlon or Pentium 4.For #2, realize that some integer operations are O(N) where N is the number of bits involved. 64-bit multiplication and division are slowerthan the same 32-bit operations. Period.
The reason AMD is able to do this is because arithmetic and logic operations can largely be implemented in a "more gates for more speed" fashion. They are closer to O(ln(N)) than O(N). But at this level of circuit design, you don't necessarily think in those terms (since N is constant, everything just looks like O(1)) -- these high speed circuit designers worry about other technical things like "latch speed".
The 64 bit integer divide may be a little slower, however, again you need to explicitely use 64 bit ints in your software, and division is a comparatively uncommon operation.
- The gain with 64-bit processors is one of address space and nothing more.
This is the largest gain (big DB people will be very happy with it) but it certainly is not the only gain. Remember that there are now twice as many SSE registers. This opens up some performance possibilities for multimedia applications.Although I don't know that its related to SSE, it should be pointed out that EPIC (as in the video game company) has ported the Unreal engine to x86-64! Like most people, I was quite surprised that they did this, however, they apparently found doing it to be worthwhile.
Do not underestimate the upside of going to 64 bits in the way that AMD has done it. They have literally made it a no-lose scenario -- that alone should spur (mostly new) application developer interest.