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More Drooling Over The Opteron

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looking-pretty dept.

bradv writes "I havent heard much about the new 64bit chips from AMD lately and was excited to find this article to satisfy my appetite for a little while longer. Probably more info than most people will ever care about. "

3 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. more info ... by blandthrax · · Score: 5, Informative

    SPEC results linked from The Inquirer ... here

  2. Re:Opteron is a tipping point by costas · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, Mr Cringely thinks the Opteron will be a huge win for AMD and makes quite a nice argument about it (based on hearsay though): link

    (top sci/tech link from memigo currently; yes it's the holidays but a few things are happening /.ers...)

  3. Re:64-bit architecture at last... by jbischof · · Score: 5, Informative
    > Think about it - the main problem in terms of pushing computing power these days is electron migration, caused by extremely high clock rates.

    Electron Migration? what are you talking about. Processors continue to get faster and faster due to improved processing technology and increased parallelism. Leakage and electromagnetic interference from the clock signal are major problems today but who knows what scientists are working with nowadays.

    > By doubling the word length to 64-bits, you can reduce the clock rate of the chip, and will still be able to perform more instructions per second than your top-of-the-range Athlon/Pentiums.

    That is absolutely not true. Having 64 bits allows you to access a larger amount of total memory, and it lets you put more information in each instruction. The amount of data you can work on in any given clock cycle is proportional to the cache access and bandwidth and the register size (Neither of which inherently need 64 bit long instructions).

    To perform more instructions per second (or instructions per clock cycle) you need instruction level parallelism (ILP). This has been a major goal of processor manufacturers for many years now. Intel had two main ways of trying to increase ILP.

    1. Use an instruction set with inherently more parallelism - allowing you to issue multiple instructions at once - Itanium
    2. Try executing from more than one thread at a time - allowing you to use more of the processor per clock cycle - Hyperthreading (now on Pentium 4 processors).