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The Battle in 64-bit Land, 2003 and Beyond

Posted by timothy on from the is-it-a-plateau dept.

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."

16 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. 64 bits.. by ObviousGuy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 /. password was too easy to guess.
    1. Re:64 bits.. by NerveGas · · Score: 5, Insightful


      "Where's the power?"

      Easy. It's in the PC.

      Yeah, I know. Some of the super-expensive RISC chips blow away PC's on floating point. But look at your FLOPS per dollar. Chances are the PC will be at least an order of magnitude lower.

      It's been trendy to bash PC's for quite a while. However, if you've been "in the business" for two decades, and had your eyes open, you've realized that things have been slowly changing.

      In the "bad old days", PC's sucked hard. Companies like Sun, DEC, and IBM were the only choices if you needed more computing power than an average automobile.

      Because of the economies of scale in the economy market - and the competition - PC chip makers like Intel, AMD, Cyrix, etc. kept improving their products steadily. Now, a modern PC chip compute with "big iron" chips very well in integer work, and are fast approaching (in some cases, BEATING) them in floating point work - and all at a tenth to a hundredth of the price.

      Back in the bad old days, it didn't matter how fast of a computer you bought, it still wouldn't run a desktop at an acceptable speed. These days, it practically doesn't matter how SLOW of a chip you buy, it'll still run a desktop at an acceptable speed.

      There will always be a market for the big iron and specialty hardware, but as time goes on, the PC technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years.

      Now, don't get me wrong. There's still room for massive amounts of improvement. I would love to see the x86 architecture, and all of the legacy crop dropped like a hot potato. I'm not confident that it will happen in this decade, but it sure would be nice if it was.

      steve

      --
      Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
  2. Re:Heat and power by Gothmolly · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you really need a 4GHz, 64bit chip for your embedded app?

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    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  3. 64Bit Apache by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hopefully, 64bit will bring some performance to the Apache project :)

    ---------

    FunPic
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    Ownage

  4. Units? by rabidcow · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  5. All Spec 2000 benchmarks? by acomj · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  6. What about software? by MisterP · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I realize the article was about CPU's but what about the software?

    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.

    1. Re:What about software? by foonf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Power4 runs AIX and OS/400 (and if it doesn't run Linux now, it should very soon). At one point a combination of AIX and SCO Unix called "Project Monterey" would have been available for IBM's Itanium systems, but it was scuttled in favor of linux.

      HP-UX has already been ported and is shipping on HP Itanium machines right now (and you probably saw that post yesterday about OpenVMS also being on the way). SGI seems to be leaning more toward linux, they were going to port Irix at one point but I don't know whether it is available yet. SGI's page on their Altix Itanium systems does not mention any OS other than Linux.

      --

      "(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
  7. Re:Who cares ... by cheezedawg · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Lousy I/O? Care to be a bit more specific? Are you talking about FSB or memory bandwidth? Bandwidth between northbridge and southbridge (v-link, i-link, etc)? I/O to integrated HDD or USB controllers? PCI? Super IO? LPC?

    There are dozens of types of I/O on an x86 system- some of them are great, some of them are "lousy", and many of them don't require anything faster than they already have (like keyboard). But as is, your comment doesnt make very much sense.

    --
    "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
  8. Re:Heat and power by ppanon · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Who in their right mind is going to stick a CPU with a die size about that of a pack of playing cards in an embedded device?

    Hmmm, maybe the military, if the application demands that level of computing horsepower?
    --
    Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
  9. You need some serious reality check here! by Fefe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  10. Totally wrong by zealot · · Score: 5, Insightful
    They can't market the Itanium 1 successfully at 800 MHz, even if it compares with a 2 GHz chip because of the perceived differential. The Itanium 2 fares better, but it's still a power hog. The companies that focuses on a balance between clock-cycles and efficient design are the only winners (namely IBM) because their chips have a wider application. You won't see an Itanium 2 in a laptop, but you might see a PPC 970.


    You couldn't possibly have a worse understanding of the markets involved here. Itanium is targeted at technical computing workstations and massively parallel processing supercomputers. The people buying these things know exactly what they're looking for, they're not Joe Consumer "tricked" by MHz over what constitutes actual performance.

    I can't believe so many posters here believe that pushing MHz in the Desktop space troubles Intel in the high end space where clock speeds are lower. It doesn't. People in the desktop space buy on MHz, people in the high end space buy on performance, reliability, scalability, and more (not necessariliy in that order either). Power usually isn't a concern (it's accepted that a costly cooling solution will be necessary).

    By the way, the reason the Itanium 1 has problems is because its performance is not good. The Itanium 2 is much, much better. Get a clue.
    --
    He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
  11. Re:Heat and power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ... IBM already has a laptop chip directly from their high-end server class processors.

    And that's because to IBM multiprocessing means thousands of processors, not just 8 or 16. With that kind of scaling in mind, power consumption is in the design criteria from the very beginning.

  12. Re:A word about 64 bits (and SPARC/Sun, too)... by palp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While you're more correct than the parent poster, I feel I should raise the point that "most people" don't have > 4GB of ram, don't encrypt their emails, don't use Photoshop, etc. In the high-end desktop and of course server markets, 64-bit obviously makes a difference. But "most people" aren't in that market.

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    -palp
  13. IO on SunFire V880s by aphor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    --- Nothing clever here: move along now...
  14. Operating System More Important Than CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.