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."

Comments

Re:64 bits..

[NerveGas]

"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

Totally wrong

[zealot]

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.