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The Battle in 64-bit Land, 2003 and Beyond
An anonymous reader writes "Paul DeMone has an excellent article up at Real World Technologies on the future of 64bit computing. Find out where MIPS, HP, Intel, AMD, Sun, Fujitsu, and IBM are headed."
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when we get to 1mbit is when things start to get interesting, until then..............
Intel will release a 64 bit processor first, but 2 months later AMD will come out with a 61 bit processor that runs twice as fast. Don't ask me how, or even why speed is relevant to the computing power, but they will do it.
Then, 6 years later, China will come out with their own.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
For those who want the article all on one page.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
The article is very detailed on many points, but doesn't seem to have much mention of environmental aspects like heat dissipation. I can remember when this was a big issue with every new CPU, but lately it seems to have been swept under the rug. What's changed?
I'm certainly interested in the speed of CPUs, but heat production in the embedded space happens to be a bigger issue for me.
Could I interest anyone in some toast?
Hah! My Commodore 64 has 64 BYTES! Hah!
how fast the x86 64-bit processors are? They are stuck on platforms with lousy I/O. Why bother to have a 64-bit processor for anything other than a server, and if you want a server, you better get one with good I/O.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
here.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
There needs to be a true revamping of CPU architecture, not simple adding of bits. 64 bits is fine and dandy, but the convoluted instruction set, seemingly random usage of registers, and an inability to do fast floating point operations really hampers the x86 system. Seeing as how IA64 is based on x86, this will be a problem into the future.
And with IBM announcing further support of the Intel architecture, there doesn't seem anywhere for the computer industry to expand.
It isn't even an argument of "what are we going to do with all this power?" It's more like "where's the fucking power?"
I have been pwned because my
What a load of bits.
It amazes me that this discussion is even taking place.
I would have thought that by now, we'd be discussing 128bit or 512bit computers. I mean, I've been working on Dec Alpha chips for 8 years now. A nice, fast, 64 bit processor. (Tru64 kinda sux though).
8 years in computer time is like 800 years in human time. What's up? 64bit processors should be old new now...
The Battle in 64-bit Land, 2003 and Beyond!!! more like celda
Otherwise, well done! Keep up the good work and Semper Fi !!!
Microsoft is eagerly awaiting 64 bit processors, as they will "greatly decrease the incidence of Integer overflow exceptions, and memory overwrites"
TOKYO, March 2, 1999 -- Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. is pleased to announce the co-development with Toshiba Corp. of the 128 bit CPU ("EE", or "Emotion Engine ") for use in the next generation of PlayStation . In order to process massive multi-media information at the fastest possible speeds, data bus, cache memory as well as all registers are 128 bits; this is integrated on a single chip LSI together with the state of the art 0.18 micron process technology. The development of a full 128-bit CPU is the first of its kind in the world.
Holy cow... I didn't know microprocessor features were still so freaking huge! Methinks the author needs to remember that there is an HTML entity readily available as µ. :) Unfortunately it seems slashdot is stripping out most of my entities so we can't see it here . 0.13 mm is 130 microns, which is roughly where IC technology was in the mid- to late-1980's if I'm not mistaken. That can't possibly be right. If use of the entity is out of the question (just as it seems to be on ./), maybe they could have said 0.000013 mm or even spelled out the word "micron" right out.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Hah! My Commodore has 64 kiB! Hah!
Hopefully, 64bit will bring some performance to the Apache project :)
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http://www.funpic.de
http://www.funpic.de/categories.php?cat_id=225
http://www.funpic.de/details.php?image_id=1889
I presume Digital...Compaq...whoever.. killed it for purely political reasons? Or are there some technical reasons I don't get?
In and of itself, a 64 bit processor with a 64 bit operation system really doesn't mean better performance. You've really got to have application which leverage that kind of platform. And there aren't many. On my SPARC servers (which all have 64 bit CPUs), going from a 32 bit OS to a 64 bit OS so no real improvement or degradation regarding performance in a wide variety of applications. Going 64 bits for most people mean nothing.
The main selling point for SPARC, which most people who aren't dealing with Sun don't understand, is not the CPU itself or the speed of a uniprocessor box.
It is the total package. (Admittedly, the lower part of that is the uniprocessor performance.) On the upside, Sun has some very compelling benefits. Almost all major UNIX programs (commercial) are developed for SPARC, often as the primary development platform. The binary compatibility is awesome. The binary tat I compiled on my workstation (with 5 years old technology that is several CPU generation behind) will containue to run the most modern hardware. There's no recompiling for different/newer architectures (unless you're looking to gain a specific advantage of a new processor and your compiler can do it). And probably one of the best features is an awesome scalability story. If your code does threads, or uses more than a processor at a time, you can scale from a 1 CPU to 100+ CPU configuration. No special programming to worry about clusters or to take advantage of new hardware. Additionally, because the hardware is (majority) single vendor, you gain a great deal of relaibility over platforms which has an incredible amount of diversity (wintel). Okay. That's a double edge sword, admittedly.
That said, it is too bad that Sun just can't keep up in the uniprocessor world. But it has quite a number of real-world advantages beyond performance which keep it afloat, which may surprise people.
Yeah, because what the STS program really needed was more RISC.
Hopefully, 64bit will bring some performance to the Apache project :)
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FunPic
Happy Tree Friends
Ownage
Wow. You could get FOUR P970 from the transistor count of ONE Itanium 2. But the Itanium 2 isn't four times faster than one P970s, its not even as fast as two P970s.
Seems that IA64 is dead. People will go x86-64 for compatibilties sake, and IBM P970 if efficiency is important..
What's with this graph? http://www.realworldtech.com/includes/images/artic les/battle64-2003-fig1.gif
Am I the only one who likes seeing UNITS on things?
Itanium 2/1000 scores a little over 1400 somethings at just above 800 something elses. Is this better or worse than the Athlon XP/2250, which scores less than 800 whatever-they-ares at 900 who-knows-whats?
Most users won't need more than 32bits for years. By 2010 normal people will probably want 64bit desktops so they can have more than 4 gigs of ram (although Intel may be able to trick them with their 36bit extension).
128bits is a LOT.
Don't be fooled by the emotion engine in the PS2. It is 128bit in the sense it can handle 4 32bit floating point numbers at once. Guess what? So does Altivec, SSE, etc!
Calling systems 128bits is like calling the Atari Jaguar 64bit when it was powered by the good old 68000 that powered the 16bit Gensesis, 16bit Amiga, etc.
Typically the number of bits something is referrs to how much memory it can address (2^32bit=4gigs for example). Marketting likes to calling things 128bit (PS2 can handle multiple 32bit numbers at once), 64bit (Jaguar had a memory bus capable of moving 64bits at once), or 24bit (The Neo Geo had a 16bit 68000 and a 8bit z80) to get your attention.
Atari was on the right track with their Jaguar, and I still think these new-fandangled 64-bits don't hold an ounce of water against my Nintendo (Ultra) 64!
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
Your own country is about to make an unprovoked and illegal attack against a soverign nation and you're bashing the people who bash Microsoftt?!?! My GOD, person, GET SOME BLOODY PRIORITIES!
I mean we all know by now those spec benchmarks really don't translate well into real world performance. He's got nothing else to go on but to say machine A is faster than machine B based on spec2000 alone is kinda nutty. Bus speed, memory bandwidth and a host of other factors effect machine speed.
Also I know POWER4 chips are made very conservativly so they don't fail as often, I'm assuming its the same for many of these other workstation chips.
Also the power consumption issue is glossed over quickly, but I'm hearing it getting to be a big deal. Power/ cooling costs are making some of these a difficult sell in the server room.
Ya. Techincally years ahead.. marketing.. 'duh.. whats that'. Same for all of the atari line after their dad bought the place.
damned moron tramiel brothers.. phfft
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Are HP and SGI porting HP-UX and Irix and all the associated apps to IA64 or are they focusing on Linux for this platform?
What about IBM and Power4? What OS (AIX?) and applications run on that platform?
I think an equally important and even more interesting aspect in this luming 64 bit war is going to be the software.
It seems Intel's got a great floating point beast in the Itanium. But is this really that hard to do from a technical stand point?
For example the Power4 can issue 4+1 branch instruction per cycle. If IBM was targetting rendering simulations (BTW with OpenGL2.0 your VPU/GPU will do this instead of you CPU! There is already a plugin for Maya that lets your ATI 9700 do the final rendering instead of yourCPU!) or science work couldn't they simply add additional floating point pipelines to handle 4 instructions per cycle?
It doesn't seem that hard to create a CPU to score well on SpecFP. Just give it lots of bandwidth and FP execution resources. Things like branching and OOOE don't really matter like they do for SpecINT. I know its not that simple, but it seems that a company would find it easier to win SpecFP than SpecINT.
Oh, and apparently, they don't have a spare $600 box to test, so they dick around on the live production servers. Yay!
One thing the article hasn't been updated to mention is that Intel have changed the Itanium roadmap. They will be introducing a dual core processor in 2005 (Montecito), this is no longer a rumour. Intel are playing catchup here, IBM and Sun are already much further along this path. Intel do however have the resources to throw into development to do this successfully, the gains they have made from Itanium-1 to Itanium-2 suggests that catching up is not beyond them.
I wonder how much of the battle for domination in the server market will be decided by economics rather than technology. I suspect that if Intel can kill off AMD (how long can AMD sustain their current losses?) then they could use their dominance in the desktop market to subsidise the development of Itanium and really drive it into the server market, killing off the strugglers like Sun by seriously undercutting them with price/performance. In the long term I think only IBM stands in Intel's way.
PCs do not even today have lousy I/O. In fact, because the PC architecture has less registers, code needs to store stuff in memory more often, which lead to PCs outperforming RISC machines in memory bandwidth over the years. Sun and IBM in particular have been outperformed in RAM bandwidth for over a decade. They mad up for it in good floating point performance, but now the PCs are catching up there as well.
;-)
By the way, AMD's HyperTransport and Hammer memory infrastructure is quite similar to the "perfect scalability" Alpha memory hardware that has been making headlines recently. I expect Hammer to rule the planet here. Madison also has huge memory bandwidth, but it wastes most of it reading NOPs and instructions that are predicated away or otherwise discarded.
Also, if you actually read the article, you will notice that even the PowerPC translates their ugly and complex instruction set to an internal instruction set, which is more RISCy. This is the very thing that RISC afficionados have been using as argument against x86 for years!
The world isn't that black and white.
If they're supposed to be reporting anything, whi are the charts unlabeled?
Is the whole thing bullshit?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
1. x86 has been revamped many times. That's why it is still competitive, although its doom has been predicted numerous times.
2. x86 actually has faster floating point than most RISC CPUs. Why don't you actually read the article and look at the stats they give there? In particular thanks to SSE, x86 not only has directly addressable floating point registers but it has huge performance gains to offer for vectorizable calculations. Did you ever ask yourself why all the movie special effects farms have moved their render farms to x86?
3. "Seeing as how IA64 is based on x86"... Care to pass that crack pipe around or are you going to smoke it all alone?
4. "And with IBM announcing further support of the Intel architecture"... ?! What the fsck are you talking about? The only Intel architecture IBM recently announced support for is IA64. You seem mighty confused, man.
Sun zealots gloss over the fact that Digital did it first, faster, and had support for it on their operating systems. Oh, and didn't need OS hacks to work around terminally buggy hardware.
Integer / Buffer overflows in Microsoft operating systems are horribly overplayed. Many will simply use this excuse to say that Linux is better than Windows, but the arguement has really been misunderstood for a long time.
The reason these errors became popular is because of Win95. Advertised as the "most stable home computing experience yet," it had several issues with overflows, the two most glaring were buffer overflows (which is still present in Windows, but being fixed with new security updates daily from MS), and ye olde integer overflows. The more problematic of the two was the latter, as it would cause blue screens and, later, the "A fatal exception in OE has occurred [...] Now closing the program" error message.
Almost all of the integer errors were fixed from Win98SE on, and are hardly a problem anymore Since 2k/XP (no, I never bothered to waste my time testing WinME). Nowadays it takes a really horribly coded program to get one of those errors, and yet the arguement lives on.
Wow, I guess that could be considered pro-Microsoft, but I've recently aquired some spare karma. Yay! Time to have a karmacue!
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Boy, Intel can't win. ;-) )
First people hammer (excuse the expression) it for making a 64-bit processor with massive parallelism (the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, or EPIC architecture) which introduces a whole different way of using the compiler/silicon relationship (which generates best perf times our there on practically all SPEC tests) - AND THEY GET YELLED AT FOR NOT BEING A DIRECT EXTENSION OF x86 ARCHITECTURE AND CHANGING THINGS TOO MUCH.
Now this fellow thinks because there's some compatibilty with old 32-bit, that it's NOT RADICALLY DIFFERENT ENOUGH.
WHAT DO YOU WANT? QUANTUM COMPUTING? (Intel's saving that for 2010...
http://www.realworldtech.com/includes/templates/ar ticles.cfm?AID=RWT012603224711&mode=print
Link provided in several other posts, AND you need only look near the upper right of the article and LO AND BEHOLD - a 'print' button!
Only the bus interface was 64-bit.
i860 was very innovative for the time, I'm not disputing that, but a 64-bit CPU it was not.
I won't switch until my favorite BSD operating system is supported. It's BSD that's important to me, not the underlying architecture.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
America is going to kill thousands of innocent people soon and you are worried about a couple of people getting killed in an accident?
Shows YOUR priorities
hansel dunlop
It is such a shame to see good CPU architechtures die, and crap live on.
The Motorola 68K family were a joy to work with - lots of registers, and a very orthoginal instruction set - you could use any A register for pointers, any D register for data - none of this "ECX is for loops, EDI for destination pointer, ESI for source pointer" crap of the x86.
It's dead now, save for use as a microcontroller.
The Alpha was a ass-kicking, name-taking monster. While I never seriously programmed on it, it was 64 bits long before anybody else knew how to spell it - it had well established software and compiler technology. It is STILL one of the leaders.
But for all intents and purposes, it's dead, Jim. Yet Itanic, with an unproven design concept, is flourishing (sorry, having worked with DSPs that implemented the VLIW idea, I have doubts about the real-world performance of VLIW in a multitasking environment).
As Billy Joel said, "Only the good die young...."
www.eFax.com are spammers
... When will Big Blue buy Sun?
(or is it just too much fun turning the hose on them...?)
HP-UX 11i 1.0 runs on PA-RISC (uname -r returns 11.11).
HP-UX 1.5 and 1.6 run on ia64 (uname -r returns 11.20 and 11.21, IIRC).
So, its there already. And you can buy boxes running it today.
How do I set my moderation to "unwilling" - I've read the FAQ which has advised me it's within preferences, but for the life of me, I can't find the option to actually change it to unwilling?
Also can I turn it back on at a later date if I want to?
Apologies once more.
Geeks hate decimal, right?
Go fuck yourself Bungi.
-Taco
Bet you're running Slowaris on that $35k ultra.
At our shop we make these little 1u dedicated boxes - mostly they do Postgres database work with a PHP front end. We initially used Sun Netras, until we found price-competitive intel kit. Anwyay.
Interesting this is that we benchmarked our application on the Netras using both Linux and Solaris, and found that Linux would run at double or triple the capacity of Solaris.
Finally someone tells it like it is! Computer architects have known for a LONG time (eg., 10 years) that MIPS and SPARC were horrible architectures (designed by people who clearly misunderstood the whole RISC concept) and that Alpha was a fantastic architecture that got the 801-idea spot on. As IBM Fellow and Turing Award winner John Cocke pointed out, the whole idea was FAST instructions that were simple enough for compilers to generate and optimize. It had nothing at all to do with the number of instruction types or their complexity. Not only was Alpha the first 64-bit architecture, but it's the only one that has legitimately scaled over a 10+ period. While it is a tragedy to see the Alpha die due to incompetent marketing, it is gratifying to finally see an informed article that gives credit where credit is due. Long live the Alpha!
The only thing that the author fails to note is HP's responsibility for the wretched Itanium 1. The first IA64 architecture was designed by HP and Intel in collaboration, and HP was the one who pushed the idiotic EPIC idea.
Unfortunately, none of the current crop of 64 bit processors deliver: the cost of true 64 bit systems (those capable of actually using more than 4 Gbytes of memory) generally starts somewhere upwards of $10000, and for that you do not get anywhere near 10 times the performance of a $1000 PC.
The main reason right now to get a 64 bit system at current prices is because the applications just cannot be shoehorned into a mere 2-4 Gbytes. If AMD can change that equation and deliver comparable bang-for-the-buck to current PCs, with 64 bit addressing being icing on the cake, they have a winner. None of the other players seem to be capable of doing that--they have tried and failed miserably so far.
If you'd ever written code, you'd know that Tru64 is hands down the BEST unix ever created. It is 100% standards compliant and extremely robust. The man pages are the best out there, and best of all, the APIs are exactly as documented in the man pages. No other Unix comes close. I've written a lot of code for Tru64, Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, Linux, and AIX. Tru64 is by far the best. Linux is next best because of all the user support. Solaris is usable if you don't mind all the careless POSIX-violating namespace pollution that occurs with every new release. IRIX and HPUX are practically unusable.
http://www.sun.com/servers/workgroup/880/
Let's all make sure we're talking about the same thing.
The IO on a server is rarely going to run through an AGP port. That's because you're not going to use a V880 to pump textures to a GPU card for playing games. A V880 is designed to kick any PC's ass up and down the street as an entry-level fast fileserver and database server.
The V880 has several PCI busses for all of its PCI slots (count em).
Some of the PCI slots are 66MHz 64 bit wide PCI slots. How many of those do you have in your PC? (clue: AGP doesn't count).
What kinds of PCs can you get that can have 64GB RAM? And 8 way concurrency on access to that RAM? (Clue: do your homework on Intel SMP limitations).
How can you possibly saturate that 533MHz FSB on the PC? You do it swapping textures across the AGP port! Try loading up your PC with FCAL adapters, hooking them to smart disk arrays with gigs of write-through cache and see how much IO you can get.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
I found that most difficult to find :(
Those little boxes made me feel responsible to do the right job and made me concerntrate more on posts I should moderate and less on relaxing and reading the comments for their content.
I hope I can enable it again one day if I ever need it (shrug)
(hey, I was in Houston-what else do they have to be proud of?) ::indignant expression::
Well, I was born there for starters, in the NERV-5 installation just to the southwest off 59.
But then, you probably weren't supposed to know about that back then, so I guess the space program is a start.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...just buy an Atari Jaguar.
I mean seriously, can't you do the math?
The man pages make fun of their own earlier/current bad design decisions.
Meep!
That's annoying, but I can see it. Not enough new equipment is being sold to support the introduction of a new architecture right now. If you want a server farm, you can buy one real cheap from someone going out of business. Might not even need to move it from the co-location site.
You guys, I don't hear any noise. Are you sure you're doing it right? -- My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult
Thrill Kill Kult rocks..... though I like the early tracks more than the later "Disco Porn Soundtrack" era. Confessions of a Knife, now thats the good stuff...
ROFL
...Intel have changed...
"Intel", being a single entity, is a singular noun.
"have" is a verb that agrees only with a plural subject in a 3rd-person context.
Is the quality of ESL education really becoming this bad ?
Wow. Reading further into your posting, it becomes even more painful to one's eyes.
Intel are playing...
Intel do...
Then you proceed to use the proper subject-verb agreement in the following independent clause:
only IBM stands in Intel's way.
Not only are you stupid, but you're inconsistent in your stupidity as well.
I'd put those GED plans on hold for the moment, if I were you.
There are almost 2^32 possible IPv4 addresses. We are told that these will be exhausted soon. Suppose that 1/8th of them actually correspond to a host on the internet: that's 2^29 hosts. Now how much data might be on each host? We only have 35 bits of virtual address left, which allows an average of 32Gb of addressable data per host. This seems very limited.
So 64 bit addresses may not be sufficient to address all of the information in the internet. Most P2P systems internally use a 128-bit address space of file hashes. So is it useful for CPU instructions to be able to address this much data using virtual addresses?Is that so?
It seems that alot of the x86 biggots are way misinformed, that or they selectively remember the articles they read. That said, x86 for years has been widely based on a RISC chip. (since the original pentium, iirc) Intel hasn't made anything worth a steaming pile of dog poo in years(a la, itanium1/2, pentium 4, p4-xeon). Sparc has made many advances, and has been 64-bit since the ultra series. Alpha (R.I.P) was a beast of a cpu. Very versitile, very fast, but as someone else said, catered to only but a few people in the market.
:) )
Sun's been up the alley and back down a few times with the 64-bit arguement. I think they JUST broke the gHz barrier with the sparcs, and i'll take a 1gHz sparc over a 3gHz PeeCee any day. Hell, i had an Ultrasparc AXi 300Mhz, 1mb cache, run circles around a p3-700 xeon w/ 1mb cache. Why? Mainly cause solaris is pretty much designed for sparc, and sparc ONLY. A port is pretty much pointless... Again, specific tool for the specific job. The bigger the job, the higher the pricetag. (would you honestly trust your 2-3 terrabyte database for medical records to a few PC's running linux? Didn't think so...
I'll keep my athlon desktop for my q3 games, but i'll use my sparc for my day-to-day stuff just because i personally think it feels faster.
or even 10^1000000 (in binary)?
I heard the Opteron is due end April, but the desktop Athlon 64 is for September.
AMD says that's because they're waiting for a 64 bit desktop O/S first. Dunno how true that is.
Or are we talking about the housekeeping processor that keeps track of scores and stuff?
AFAIK, the Athlon 64 (the consumer chip) has been delayed to concentrate on getting the Opteron (server chip) to market.
The almost-same in Java, "thank Object" just doesn't sound the same. Score: C++ 1, Java 0?
Yes, I like Java over C++ ;p
Flamebait or "unmutual"?
Scores of people dying in Mideast incidents are discussed elsewhere on the Internet.
So are thousands of people dying annually on US highways, for those who feel only US events matter.
Saying the Atari Jaguar was "powered" by the 68K is like saying my computer is only 8 bits, because the 8042 controller that talks to the keyboard is 8 bits.
The 68K was an I/O processor - the main processors in the system WERE 64 bits.
And the 68K family were 32 bits from the get-go: address registers, program counter, and data registers were all 32 bits. True, the external bus interface to the world was a 16 bit wide datapath and 24 bit wide address path on the 68000, but the 68020 was a full 32/32 path. And even the 68K itself still used that 16 bit bus to fetch 32 bits of data (2 operations per word).
Do you classify the 386SX a 16 bit part? - because it had the exact same sort of interface to the world - 16 bit data bus, 24 bit address bus.
True, many of the modern video cards incorrectly call themselves 128 or 256 bit devices when the largest single numerical value they can work with is 32 bits or less, but do try to be accurate in what you complain about.
www.eFax.com are spammers
And yes, I do realise that 2048 bits is generally 32 bits float * 4 channels * 16 pixels/texels per cycle. But I was having a dig at Intel, whose adverts seem to show that the Pentium brand lets you read CD-rom drives, access the internet and get high texture fill-rates, when with some games, it almost is a housekeeping chip.
You have your right to free speech. You also have a right to be an utter asshole if you wish. But I don't think anyone cares if this tragedy "technically" qualifies as a textbook "worst incident" scenario for the US Space Program.
I don't know who said it first but I'll say it again, "While you may have the right to do something, that does not mean you are always right in doing it."
So next time just STFU.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
A SUV is useful, if you're a park ranger or someone else who actually needs the high clearance and 4WD. But the general populace has been convinced that they need one, even at the expense of high maintenance costs and poor gas mileage.
Similiarly, these kind of 64-bit processors are useful, if you're building high-end servers, designing aircraft, or doing many types numerical simulation. They certainly aren't designed for anyone else, with insane power consumption levels and heat issues. There's no way an Itanium 2 is ever going to work in a laptap or game console, for example. I hope the faux high end PC crowd realizes this, and we don't end up with the bottom end machine from Dell in a few years shipping with a 200 watt 64-bit processor. What a tremendous waste that would be.
As an aside, it's interesting how these CPU manufacturers aren't concentrating on what would be most useful: low price, low power consumption, and small form factor. It's like the early 1980s minicomputer market (VAX, etc.) compared with home computers from the same era (Apple, Atari, etc).
From a system administration and architecture point of view, if the CPUs in question are generally in the same ballpark from a performance standpoint it's decidely more important what operating system you can run on it.
For example, if I had an Oracle database to run, would I run it on Solaris, AIX, or Windows?
CPU-wise, AIX and Windows are better off, however, if given the choice I would always choose Solaris as it's better than AIX (a truly IBM'ed up version of UNIX...yuck), and worlds apart from Windows from a reliability and administration standpoint.
Anyone who read the article asks the same thing.
You're right that computer architecture is in for some big changes in the coming decades, but probably not in the ways that you expect. As some other posters pointed out, the RISC/CISC debate is over. The big problem is that all popular architectures are still structured around the idea of a single sequential instruction stream.
Computer architects have more transistors than they can shake a stick at now, but at some point it becomes impossible to accelerate a single RISC/CISC instruction stream by throwing more transistors at it. What we need are new architectures that are designed from the ground up for serious parallelism. I'm not talking about 4 or 8 parallel execution units, I'm talking about tens, hundreds, even thousands of instructions executing independently.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend checking out the ADAM architecture from MIT or the PipeRench architecture from CMU. Obviously, these ideas are not yet commercially available, but I expect that within 10 years we are going to see a major leap in the mainstream processor world to more highly parallel architectures.
Cheers,
Benjamin
'Nuf said.
Sorry for the problem. There was a 'communication problem' at the hosting site between the data base server and the web server (though both were running fine).
:-(.
I think someone unplugged something, and it took them 14 hours to figure it out.
Regards,
Dean