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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!
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
Lousy I/O?
A few weeks ago, I was looking into buying a $35,000 Sun system. I needed a machine with better memory bandwidth than a PC could offer. The machine in question interleaved its memory 8 ways, if you had all of the processers!
Then, I noticed that each bank ran at 75 MHz. Boy, was I shocked. That means that all 8 banks together run at the equivalent of 600 MHz. The new Granite Bay chipsets, with dual DDR 333, give you the equivalent of 666 MHz.
Both systems use PCI to connect to the outside world. The PC has a 533 MHz front-side bus, and an AGP port. I can't think of anywhere that the Sun would have had any better I/O.
Now, when you get into 8-way systems, the I/O between processers is better on the "high end" machines. But before you can come up with more I/O than a modern PC, you have to spend about 6 figures. In other words, two ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HIGHER!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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...
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.
I wanted one, but it was too RISCy at the time.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
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
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.
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...