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Intel: No Rush to 64-bit Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "Advanced Micro Devices and Apple Computer will likely tout that they can deliver 64-bit computing to desktops this year, but Intel is in no hurry. Two of the company's top researchers said that a lack of applications, existing circumstances in the memory market, and the inherent challenges in getting the industry and consumers to migrate to new chips will likely keep Intel from coming out with a 64-bit chip--similar to those found in high-end servers and workstations--for PCs for years."
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wow 64 bits
there are migration issues, but 16 -> 32 bit happened quite smoothly.
AMD will maybe get a leap on Intel here.
Right now 4 GB of memory might be enough. But switching to 64 bit when we are already hitting the wall is not an option. The point with going to 64 bits now is that we can add memory past 4 GB without the headaches of moving to a new platform, since the transition is already done.
If Intel keeps on braking a lot of people will get really disappointed when they realize they need more memory than their platform supports.
.: Max Romantschuk
They're hardly likely to talk up the benefits of 64-bits on the desktop when their current 64-bit chip is so unsuitable. As and when they have an equivalent to AMD/Apple on the desktop, you can be sure they'll be more than happy to sing its praises.
What's interesting is the "nobody really needs 4Gb this decade" line. Just about every Mac in this room has 1Gb in it, and even the crappy test PC has 768Mb. 4Gb will be here sooner rather than later...
64-bit computing has been around forever, just not on the PC platform. It's really not a big deal. And as for the desktop? There's no need whatsoever, as any performance benefits will be offset by the cost of change. I'm sure the Quake-playing twits will scream bloody murder, but the rest of us won't even notice.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
unless i'm mistaken, hasnt apple been risc based for a while..? yet it says "Advanced Micro Devices and Apple Computer will likely tout that they can deliver 64-bit computing to desktops this year"
i'm pretty sure the g3 and g4 (maybe even the 603 and 604) were already 64-bit...long before AMD and Intel decided to defect from their trusty CISC chips. i might be mistaken.
I for one don't need it on my desktop. I'm sure some will disagree, but most users don't need top-spec machines.
Well if there is no hardware, how can there be 64 bit apps?
But the gaming market is going to drive this and the hardcore gamers already build their systems (with AMD?). Intel will lose nothing at first.
the whole pc architecture should ideally be replaced. we're still using something designed in the 80's, with lil hacks here and there to make it work in this current day. unfortunatly, it would be incredibly difficult to do, as all software and hardware would have to be remade. backward compatibilty slows us down from moving forward. even if everything was replaced, how long till it would be obsolete and need a further replacement?
Doesn't it slow things down, that instead of having to get X amount of memory to get a program running, twice that has to be grabbed just to run code... negating by half the advances in memory bus technology we've gained lately?
Surely a decent 64-bit cpu would kick along an x86 emulator at an acceptable rate in the same way we can emulate anything you want on the SNES or N64 fine.
All you need to solve is the quite abysmal video rates of things like virtualPc.
Basically you need a WinUAE for PCs.
And the reason Intel are holding back is contained in the first line here. Their 64-bit chip is crap.
AMD will (eventually) release the Hammer. Given that it is backwards compatible with IA32, the problems with application availablilty simply do not apply. AMD are in a strong position to become the leader on desktop CPU's and chipsets. If they can finally get Hammer out, that is.
They would say that there's no hurry to the 64-bit desktop beacause they are not in a position to provide one. They have the expensive, specialised itanic for the high-end and HP have told them to be quiet about Yamhill, their Hammer equivalent. Apple and AMD are on to a winner. Personally, I can't wait to get a 64-bit home machine. That's why I haven't upgraded for over 3 years. Intel is advocating hacks to get around the 4GB limit just like the old LIM (Lotus intel Microsoft) Expanded Memory boards for the old IBM PCs of yore : basically segmentation and paging. Anyone who can remember those days will concur. I'm afraid intel will need to pull a rabbit out of its hat very soon. Expect to see Yamhill processors announced later this year (Pentiums, Xeons?, with "64-bit extensions").
Stick Men
So after this AMD is contemplating the release of Hammer and Moto/IBM/Apple are teaming on the next gen macintosh. Both teams are celebrating and letting schedules slip to ensure a good product.
15 minutes later, Intel pulls the rug and releases a consumer level 64 bit cpu. Calling the former press release a premarketing bell weather.
Yes but some of us would actually stand to benefit from a commodity 64 bit proc. Those of us (like my Physics teach with a Phd in Biomolecular Physics) do active research and number crunching on molecular designs. People such as me need the boost to video/3d modelling apps where hitting 4gb memory limits is common. True that 64 bit solutions exist, but the problem is making them affordable. (And at 5k each, Sun Workstations and SGI boxen are not to the average college student).
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Intel has rewarmed segmented memory. Great, thanks, just what we need in 2003. More hacks that we'll have to work around in 5 years time in order to remain backwards compatible. Man, I can't wait!
Wouldn't it make more sense to put that 64 on the server, with XXGB of RAM, and push the display to the clients? X-terms, Terminal Services, whatever? Then, what, you've got 64 bit apps on the server, and a 32 bit clients, and no worry about memory usage.
Put identity in the browser.
that there is a lack of applications for
the intel 64 bit is cause there not
backwards compatable.. sure run your 32
bit apps, but run them like they are runing
on an old proccessor..
there own stupid fault..
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Translation: We aren't done yet.
Being an investor in AMD, I'm really happy about the path Intel has chosen to take. My almost 1000 shares of AMD stock will finally be over the water again!!! :)
:(
Intel is committing hara-kiri in my opinion here (thats suicide for honor in Japanese). Similar events return to my memory, and history has proved all these were utterly wrong... (Its sad to acknowledge that I REMEMBER when some of these things happened!
- Intel 286 vs 386 (IBM: A 286 is enough for most people...)
- IBM Microchannel vs ISA (The same thing)
- 'A good programmer should be able to do anything with 1K of memory'. I don't remember the author, but probably someone from IBM in the 60s or 70s.
Time flies...
Didn't Apple manage to get their (admittedly smaller) user base to switch to a better processor?
Intel's argument against 64-bit computing seems to be an advertisement for the x86-64 concept. The article didn't mention gaming, but surely the gamer market will be a major early-adopter base. It sounds like preemptive marketing to me.
As for memory, the article, and presumably intel, don't seem to account for the ever-increasing memory footprint of Microsoft's operating system (or for the GNOME stuff on our favorite OS), and so are perhaps too dismissive of the need for a >4GB desktop. As we all know all too well, one can never have too much memory or disk space, and applications and data will always grow to expand to the limits of both.
Personally, I'm holding off on any new hardware for my endeavors until I see what AMD releases, though I would settle for a Power5-based desktop...
They're faster for computations that use large numbers (mostly scientific software; OS or office software probably won't benefit a lot from it). 64-bit processors are also able to address a lot more memory (2^64 bytes instead of 2^32 bytes = 4 GB).
This sounds eerily familiar to what 3DFX was saying about 32-bit graphics just before they started to die. Intel is a much bigger fish than 3DFX ever was, but still...
One of the fundamental rules of current computer design is that there is nothing one processor can do that another cannot, given enough time. Where 64 bit processors have an advantage is in the amount of memory they can directly address - 32-bit processors stop at 4GB, while 64-bit processors have a theoretical limit of more than one trillion terabytes. A 64-bit processor can work on very large data sets very efficiently, at least in theory. However, modern 32 bit processors can now work on multiple 32-bit instructions simultaneously - or 32-bit instructions with large amounts of data - as well as address more than their basic 4GB memory limit so the architectural lines are blurred.
Basically a 32 bit CPU can address up to 4GB of memory, put aside some strange stuff.
With a 64 bit CPU, you could address.. hmm well at least LOTS of memory, 4 billion times more.
... AMD sponsored someone like ID Games or Epic to port their games engines to 64 bit? Surely the extreme gamers would force the market open as they have done in the 3D graphics market?
64-bit processors will be faster than 32-bit processors at some things, and slower at others. The reasons are technical, however the main advantage of 64-bit processors is that they can address larger amounts of memory without a speed penalty.
Intel still wants to keep rediculous margins for their products. AMD's approach brings everything closer together. The fastest computers are being built out of cheap consumer level processors, so why have incredibly expensive "server" processors?
Separation of consumer and "server" processors is just marketing, which is Intel's strongest talent (like Microsoft).
This is my sig. The post is over.
DEC Alpha's blueprints are also owned by intel. this platform exists for more than 12 years now.
Why do they pull the plug on this monster, while they promote their own crippled ia64 crap.
it can't be RAM issues, because 64 bit computing is almost venerable.
what's the truth behind this discission ?
just a thought
roger
And as for the desktop? There's no need whatsoever,
In the beginning, no one really needed a PC either. It is not need that drives the tech market, its want.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
this sounds like an omen for a booming 64 bit market before year end to me. What do you all think, especially when I read about Apple already being RISC and 64 bit ready - even if only half baked.
Does anyone recall Bill saying that the internet was dead, and the future was with MSN.
What's the big difference between 32-bit processors and 64-bit processors?
A 64-bit machine can address more than 4 GB of memory without funky segmented addressing kludges. This has applications in scientific simulation and database managers.
A 64-bit machine can also handle 64-bit integers as a native data type. This is important for encryption, number theory, financial applications dealing with money over $40 million, etc.
Will I retire or break 10K?
4 billion times lots ought to be enough for anybody.
Would someone like to break out the sock puppets and explain what other advantages (besides the 4GB Ram ceiling) that 64 bit processors will give a desktop user?
I believe it has more to do with Intel not wanting to drive down the cost of IA64 chips just yet. They're just beginning to get deployed in larger systems, which have longer design cycles than desktops. If they rush IA64 to the desktop, they would drive down the profits they could make off of the chips going in servers as they haven't even ramped up yet. Not to mention the fact they'd end up driving down the cost of their x86 CPUs
This gives me a bad case of deja vu. I still remember all to well the problems of 16 bit processor and the attempt to expand the address-range when 16-bit addressing became too big a constraint.
First there were the segment/offset addressing, which is bad enough. Then came extended/expanded memory and all its quirks og incompatibilities.
Lets not do that again. For most computers 32-bit linear addressing will still be enough for a while (remember, noone will ever need more than 64MB of RAM *grin*) - and for those who actually needs more than the 32-bit architecture can provide not going for the full monty of 64 bit will not be an issue.
Wouldn't it make more sense to put that 64 on the server, with XXGB of RAM, and push the display to the clients?
Not if there's a dial-up link between the server and client.
Not if the application is movie editing. 640x480 pixels x 24fps x 24-bit color = too big for even 100Mbps Ethernet.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Intel answer allows for a chip to have more than 4G of physical memory in much the same way the old LIM EMS boards allowed a 8086 to have more than 1M of memory - it is a form of bank switching.
True, you could have a PIII with 10G of memory on it (in theory, anyway), but this would not help you for the common applications for which you need these quantities of memory - databases, video editing and so on.
In those tasks, you have ONE program that needs lots of memory. You ideally want to be able to take a multi-gigabyte file, and mmap() it so that it appears to your program to be just a stretch of memory. Then you can access the file with a simple pointer, and moving within the file is nothing more than pointer manipulation. You don't have to worry about paging the file in and out - that is the OS's virtual memory manager's problem.
PAE won't help you in those cases. At best, you can back some of the buffer cache with the PAE memory, creating in effect a glorified RAM disk.
PAE is great if you have a machine running hundreds of processes, each of which takes 100M of space. But this usually is NOT the case.
Just as machines with more than 1M of memory started out the providence of the high-end user and slowly moved down, 64 bit address space on the desktop will start out the providence of the high-end folks first, then will move down as it becomes more common.
I would guess the likely sequence will be something like:
1) We *nix folks had it first - I was running 64 bits on my Alpha years ago. But we are not "the masses", and so will be ignored by the mainstream.
2) The Macs will be next - Apple will port MacOS X to the newer 64 bit Power chips. This will greatly simplify video editing - one of Apples favorite areas to compete in. 64 bit Apple will make the Mac the chosen platform for video editing of large files (NOTE: a 40 minute capture from my Firewire camcorder is a couple of gig - so already the home consumer is getting close to needing this.)
3) Windows will finally release a 64 bit OS (also note: they could have done this YEARS ago under Alpha, but didn't - Windows NT under Alpha only could access a 32 bit address space.) Microsoft will hail this as a revolutionary breakthrough - "Windows AYCABTU is the first 64 bit OS for the home user!" *nix and Apple users will scratch their heads in puzzlement.
www.eFax.com are spammers
it has been rumoured that intel has x86-64 code biult into their processor. assuming that is ture they are in a pretty good spot right now so why should the give a rats A** what AMD is doing at the moment. but an even better question why do people still hold so much merit in intel when their processors do so poorly clock for clock? I think that if the tables where turned everyone would still love intel
Why? I follow the semiconductor stocks and AMD is one I would avoid. They show no signs of being profitable anytime soon. Look at their income statement for Q3 2002. On revenue of $508m they lost $254m. Barring inventory, they have about $860m in the bank in cash and short-term investments, but they have $1.2 billion in long term debt. I view AMD as a very speculative investment.
To be honest, INTC has a much better balance sheet, but I wouldn't put much of an investment in them, either.
And, last year, while the S&P lost 22%, I made 3%, so I beat the broad index by 25%, so I like to pretend I know a little something about picking stocks, but will admit I'm no expert.
If a process can only see a certain fraction of the memory, it would make sense, regardless of how large that fraction is, to make memory intensive applications like web servers and simulations multiprocess, right?
Well, isn't that one of the things HT makes more efficient?
What's this Submit thingy do?
I think Intel is currently dismissing 64-bit computing except for specialized needs because the vast majority of current mainstream software doesn't support 64-bit operations.
But I think that will change almost overnight once operating software that supports the Athlon 64/Opteron becomes widely available. We know that Linux is being ported to run in native Athlon 64/Opteron mode as I type this; I also believe that Microsoft is working on an Athlon 64/Opteron compatible version of Windows XP that will be available by time the Athlon 64 is released in circa September 2003 (we won't see the production version of Windows Longhorn until at least the late spring of 2004 (IMHO), well after the new AMD CPU's become widely available).
Before you reply with a bunch of other reasons why my PCs are becoming more obsolete with each passing day anyway, think back to the transition between the 286 and 386. The 386 could run everything a 286 could run and it performed much better. Due to the performence benefit, most applications that couldn't be run on a 286 wouldn't have run well on a anyway.
The transition to 64-bit on the desktop isn't going to be the same. While 640k may not be enough for everybody, 4GB is certainly enough for web browsing, wordprocessing and basic photo manipulation. I'd hate to see the horribly inefficient code that requires more than 4GB of RAM for such simple tasks.
Realistically, the force that will cause 64-bit to be a requirement on the desktop will be the version of Windows that no longer runs on 32-bit hardware. Windows XP's minimum requirements are:
If you look at the current system requirements compared to the current top end PC hardware, it's easy to see why Intel wants to hold off on production of 64-bit processors targeted for the desktop market.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Prediction: AMD and companies building boxes with their chips will make a lot out of this decision. There will be ads comparing their 64-bit system vs. the others with "only" 32 bits, and Intel will be forced by consumer pressure to get something 64-bit onto the desktop in a hurry. If there's one thing you can count on with consumers (particularly in Ammurica), it's that bigger is perceived as better.
64-bit CPUs are really an OS designer's wet dream. There are lots of things (bounce buffers, dynamic RAM map, prelinking headaches) that just go away with a 64-bit address space. You can just map all RAM permenently, prelink all binaries to a unique address, and move on with your life (or lack thereof). I was thinking the other day, that with the move to database oriented filesystems like Reiser4 and LonghornFS (for lack of a better name) that the time is ripe for some of that OO research from the 80's and 90's to kick in. The gist is that instead of the basic abstraction being files with a strict naming hierarchy, the basic abstraction is a set of objects with a very flexible database index. Throw in object persistence, and you've got yourself a very elegant setup, with basically and OODBMS at the core of the system. However, straightforward (fast) implementations of the scheme blow away a 4GB address space. For something like this, you really want to be able to mmap() a 120GB harddrive and remove a whole lot of intervening hacks.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
A little bit of computer engineering here for you...
RISC and CISC are the two main forms of processors out there these days. RISC simply means that an operation instruction is embedded with both the opcode and the operands. A CISC chip is one in which the opcode tends to be the first instruction processed and the operands are the next couple of instructions inputted.
My CMPT 150 course (introduction to Computer Design) was done entirely with a Motorola HC11 Processor emulator, which is a CISC processor.
The advantage to RISC processing is that you can put in "Pipelining", which basically means a buffer for all data throughout the CPU at different levels. Now, this means that a single chunk of opcode/operand takes x clock cycles to process (x being the number of levels you have to your pipeline), but it also allows the processor to do multiple things at once, so that after the first instruction goes through to the last buffer, there's one waiting right after it for the next clock cycle, so a RISC processor can give a new CPU instruction with every single clock cycle.
Confused yet? Let me put it this way...
Pretend that your CPU is a plumbing system, with water streaming through hot and cold pipes to deliver a prefered temperature for the water. Now, the water temperatures are your CPU data (signals, bits, whatever...) and your pipes are your cpu circuitry.
Now, you want to send a big chunk of hot water down to the bottom of your pipe system using a bunch of intermediary valves (or/and/not/xor gates) and a specific pathway (Let's not ask why, let's just assume you want to do that). Now, say right after that you want to send a bunch of cold water down a similar path, but not necessarily the same path, however you will want to use some of the same pipes.
Now, with a CISC processor, what you would do is you would send down the hot water, occasionally storing it in some pipes whilst you send down the cold water, and the sheer design of the system would keep the Hot and Cold waters seperate and you would be able to output your hot water, and then output your cold water, once they have gone through their systematic storages and movements around.
The annoying thing about this is you need a sophisticated CPU to do it. And you need a bunch of clock cycles to open and close the valves and whatnot and finally get your desired output.
Now, a RISC processor does something a bit smarter.... It throws your hot water in (First clock cycle) and just lets the valves automatically trickle to the bottom, and then, on the second clock cycle, send the cold water down. The downside of this is the fact that your single clock cycle is going really slow, which means you have a big lineup of people requesting hot and cold water and they have to wait for it to come out (Lag, for those taking notes in computer-world).
So, we instate pipelining.
Pipelining is a bunch of basins (let's say 4) that appear at different levels of the pipe system.
So, you dump your hot water in the top basin. (First clock cycle)
Then, you unlock the basin and let it dump into the second basin. Once it's done that, once again, seal the basin and dump your cold water in. Now, (second clock cycle) open the plugs for both basins, and your hot water goes down the tubes (magically) before the cold water shows up and you can re-plug your basin. Now you have room for more water in the top basin.
Every move into a new basin is a clock cycle, so It takes 4 clock cycles for it to finally reach the bottom so you can do whatever the hell it is you would want to do with hot or cold water. However, these are relatively quick clock cycles compared to the clock cycle you had in your non-pipelined RISC architecture. And, ultimately, once the first output reaches the bottom, you only have to wait a single clock cycle for the input right after it, rather than waiting another oh-so-many amounts of clock cycles that you would've in your CISC architecture.
Did that make sense to anybody? I hope it did.
Karma: Non-Heinous
I'm sure Intel will rush to make Palladium and TCPA compliant hardware for Micro$oft.
-A
Intel didn't want to make the jump to 32 bit, so they introduced "segment registers". They tried to convince people that this was actually a good thing, that it would make software better. Of course, we know better: segment registers were a mess. Software is complex enough than to have to deal with that. That's why we ended up with 32 bit flat address spaces.
64 bit address spaces are as radical a change from 32 bit as 32 bit was from 16 bit. Right now, we can't reliably memory map files anymore because many files are bigger than 2 or 4 Gbytes. Kernel developers are furiously moving around chunks of address space in order to squeeze out another hundred megabytes here or there.
With flat 64 bit address spaces, we can finally address all disk space on a machine uniformly. We can memory map files. We don't have to worry about our stack running into our heap anymore. Yes, many of those 64 bit words will only be filled "up to" 32 bits. But that's a small price to pay for a greatly simplified software architecture; it simply isn't worth it repeating the same mistake Intel made with the x86 series by trying to actually use segment registers. And code that actually works with a lot of data can do what we already do with 16 bit data on 32 bit processors: pack it.
Even if having 4G of memory standard is a few years off yet, we need 64 bit address spaces. If AMD manages to release the Athlon 64 at prices comparable to 32 bit chips, they will sell like hotcakes because they are fast; but even more worrisome for Intel, an entirely new generation of software may be built on the Athlon 64, and Intel will have no chips to run it on. If AMD wins this gamble, the payoff is potentially huge.
The ceiling is 2/3GB not 4GB.....a process can only get 2GB of memory maximum as the other 2GB is reserved for the operating system itself...(in win2k/xp if you modify your boot.ini with the switch /3 this becomes 3GB process/1GB OS)
Intel is behaving a bit like IBM when the PC was invented. IBM had all the pieces and managed to lose their position as a market leader in no time, mostly because they didn't understand the market they were in.
Intel currently owns the market for low end workstations and servers. If you need a web server or a cad station you get a nice P4 with some memory. This is also the market where the need for 64 bit will first come. At some point in time some people will want to put 8 GB of memory in their machine. AMD will be able to deliver that in a few months, Intel won't.
My guess is that Intel is really not that stupid (if they are, sell your intel shares) and has a product anyway but wants to recover their investment on their 32 bit architecture before they introduce the 64 bit enhanced version of their P4. The current P4 compares quite favorably to AMDs products and AMD has had quite a bit of trouble keeping pace with Intel. AMD needs to expand their market whereas Intel needs to focus on making as much money as they can while AMD is struggling. This allows them to do R&D and optimize their products and ensure that they have good enough yields when the market for 64 bit processors has some volume. Then suddenly you need 64 bit to read your email and surf the web and Intel just happens to have this P5 with some 64 bit support. In the end, Intel will as usual be considered a safe choice.
Jilles
No....compared to little PCs which may only have 64- or 128-bit busses out to RAM
64 bits memory access is indepdent of the size of your pointer. As you point out current PC's already have >32 bits size busses.
It will slow your programs al little bit down because pointers (and integers) are bigger so more data has to be moved. Also you want data structoures to be alligned at 64 bit bouderies which mackes those structures biggger. (This will cost only a few % performance.)
The whole Linux architecture should ideally be replaced. We're still using something designed in the 70s, with lil hacks here and there to make it halfway usable in the current day. Unfortunately, it would be incredibly difficult to do, as the macrokernel system and crusty old ASCII-pipe-based GNU tools would have to be remade. Unix compatibility slows us down from moving forward. Even if everything was replaced, how long till RMS decided it was the work of Satan and began on a further replacement?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Linux handles 64GB on ia32, and has for quite some time.
I keep hearing all this bs about the 4GB limit. I keep hearing how this is what 64 bits will fix. Sure you could have a larger memory with 64 address bits, but that's not all you get! In fact, that's not even half of it.
/. ever want to do anything with large numbers? Does no one want to be accurate to more than 32 bits?
I wrote a little library that strings together a bunch of unsigned longs. It in effect creates an X-bit system in software for doing precise addition, subtraction, etc. This library would be considerably faster if I could string 64 bit chunks together instead of 32 bit chunks. Does no one on
What about bitwise actions like XOR, NOR, and NOT. You can now perform these operations on twice as many bits in one clock cycle. I'm not really into encryption, but I think this can speed things up there.
Many OS's (file systems) limit the size of a file to 4GB. This is WAY crazy too small! This again stems from the use of 32 bit numbers. When the adoption of 64 bit machines is complete, this limit will be removed as well. Again, 32 bits isn't just about ram.
I could really go on all day. The point is this: Twice the bits means twice the math getting done in the same amount of time (in some situations). So if a person were to write their code smart to take advantage of it, you would have all around faster code and a larger memory size. Sounds like a nice package to me.
Really, give the 4GB limit a rest. Lets talk about some of the exciting optimizations we can do to our code to get a speed boost!
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Everything else being equal, is there a handy computational performance relationship between 64 and 32 bit systems(consider that one is no where near reaching the 4GB memory limit)? Such as if AMD will have a chip that can run either at 32 or 64, will it take X seconds on the 64 and nX seconds on the 32? Is n a constant? Is it not that simple?
If you need big processing, you still buy the big iron. Next time you're at the airport and the ticket agent is checking you in, sneak a peek at the logos on the terminals they're using. Oh sure they'd love to upgrade to a spiffy new-fangled GUI based dingus, just no one's figured out quite how to do that.
When I signed on with IBM back in 1994 they were trying to replace their big iron with PCs. "By end of year 1995," they promised us, "all the mainframes will be gone and all our applications will run on Lotus Notes." Well here it is nearly a decade later and they still haven't replaced that big iron, and they'll never get rid of their RETAIN technical support database. No one can figure out how to deliver RETAIN's performance on any other platform.
Sure, today a mainframe might consist of over a thousand high-end desktop processors working in unison, but look how many processors they had to slap in there to deliver the performance the customers expect from that big iron. And those are all wired together and working closely, unlike that (much smaller) network cluster your latest clueless technical manager just suggested.
So what Intel is really saying here is their marketing department just realized that they will never deliver that kind of performance in a desktop or even in a 4 to 8 way "server" machine. The customers they're targeting will continue to purchase the big iron when they need that kind of processing power, and the "toy" shops are happy with the 32 bit processing power. By the way, Google essentially just built themselves a mainframe. I wonder how the cost of their solution would stack up against the biggest iron IBM currently provides...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Besides 64 bit integers (but there is not a big problem adding 64 bit Longs in 32 bit processors) there is the great coolness factor:
:" the Nintendo 64 provides 64-bit graphics and CD-quality sound at a blistering 93.75 MHZ." I gues you need the 64 bits to expand from 4 M to 8 M. Oh wait that is mega byte, not gigabyte.
-My PC has twice the number of bits yours ancient 32 bit pc has.
-And
When talking about a CPU's bit size, people usually mean the size of the primary registers and ALU.
The address bus isn't necessarily the same size.
The 6510 CPU used in the C64 was a 8bit CPU with a 16bit address bus. So, it could handle 64 Kbytes, but only numbers 0-255.
The Intel Pentium series are actually 32bit CPUs with a 40bit (if I remember correctly) address bus. These processors can actually handle 64GB of memory. However, it is done using similar segment technology as that used to make the 16bit 8088 address 1MB of memory, and nobody wants to use that.
As fast as the hardware engineers struggle to keep up with Moore's law, shoddy programmers backed by cheapskate management labor to set the performance gains back.
Kids these days...
Request your free CD of my piano music.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Since one thing holding us up is backwards compatibility, why bother building it into the CPU at all? Partner with VMware; pay them to build a 64-bit version of the VM that will act like a 32-bit PIII or IV so people can run their apps until they're rewritten properly (or forever, if they're never rewritten). I guess first you need the 64-bit Windows to make it attractive to the corporate customer.
With investment from Intel and Microsoft, they could release a cheap VM workstation optimized to run Windows only. They could even detect a 32-bit app starting up and shove it off to the VM, where it sounds like it might run faster. Well, easy for me to say, I guess. Make it so!
Also, MS is buying Connectix, but their VMs are below VMware's quality, and it seems they bought it mainly for the server product. But this strategy could still work for them; build the 64-bit Windows workstation with a built in 32-bit VM.
Bill Gates claims that he never said 640K was enough memory. His denial appeared in an interview in the New York Review of Books. In fact, he says that he believed the opposite. (The slashdot audience can decide on his veracity.) Below is a quote from the article "He's Got Mail" by James Fallows:
One quote from Gates became infamous as a symbol of the company's arrogant attitude about such limits. It concerned how much memory, measured in kilobytes or "K," should be built into a personal computer. Gates is supposed to have said, "640K should be enough for anyone." The remark became the industry's equivalent of "Let them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly condescension with a lack of interest in operational details. After all, today's ordinary home computers have one hundred times as much memory as the industry's leader was calling "enough."
It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie Antoinette, who greeted news that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de la brioche. (The phrase was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when Marie Antoinette was thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And it now appears that Bill Gates never said anything about getting along with 640K. One Sunday afternoon I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether the quote was accurate or apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I found a long e-mail from Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the reasons why he had always believed the opposite of what the notorious quote implied. His main point was that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the design of processing chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing to raise the limit as hard and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's convincing denial, the quote is unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression of the computer industry's sense that no one can be sure what will happen next.
Click here to read the full article.
IMHO, Intel just doesn't want to do the same error they did with Pentium 4, eg. release a processor with an extended instruction set when no application has been built to use it. That's what allowed AMD to grow on the market.
Furthermore, Intel Itanium has very poor compatibility with 32-bit applications, whereas AMD Athlon64 supports them natively. So releasing Itanium too early would once again mean poor performance compared to AMD, and potentially reproduce the P4 problem.
Hallowed be Thy
Kind of like how a speed bump on the road can sometimes have a positive effect for traffic on the whole. Consider the current state of (desktop) software: its rarely written with efficiency as an important consideration. Often, there is not much incentive to do so: as long as it runs comfortably on decently new hardware, its fine. As a result, people who are forced to use bottom-of-the-line hardware are screwed. (Like me. I'm running my webserver on stone-age hardware, simply because I can't afford anything more). In fact, Microsoft even goes to the extent of deliberately makign its new releases require the latest hardware to force users into an upgrade cycle. This is a Bad Thing.
Now consider the effect that the 32-bit speedbreaker will have. Applications like gaming will be affected first. Since they have to add more features without getting more memory expensive, there will be incentive to do more efficient coding. In turn there will be pressure on underlying libraries to be more efficient. Other apps using these libs will start benefitting. There will also be more programmers catching those memory leaks which eat tons of memory rather than postponing them to a future release. More emphasis on software engg in general.
The bottom line: more headaches for programmers for a couple of years, but smaller, faster, better software for a long time.
Another technique for expanding the memory capacity of current 32-bit chips is through physical memory addressing, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst of Mercury Research. This involves altering the chipset so that 32-bit chips could handle longer memory addresses. Intel has in fact already done preliminary work that would let its PC chips handle 40-bit addressing, which would let PCs hold more than 512GB of memory, according to papers published by the company.
I dunno about them, but my 32 bit system already has 768MB. 40 bit addressing would present the interesting effect of needing memory manufactures to buy into a different addressing standard, which, as you can well imagine, they'll be slow to do, even with Intel pitching it. Also keep in mind that AMD could follow suit, with their 32 bit line. This doesn't strike me as a very realistic direction to go.
Intel still has some mileage in the P4, throwing more cache at it, etc., but 64 bits is something computer techies understand, and once 64 bit PC's start rolling out, everything else will seem second best, particularly if AMD plays their advertising cards right.
Oh, and the 'no need' argument never has flown. I've been hearing it for decades. If anyone actually listened to it we'd still be pon PC-AT's with VGA.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
x86 (and Windows and Linux on x86) can support up to 64GB of ram, not 4GB.
Those Mac emulators still work, and still run the ancient software, on a modern OS X Mac. My father has a word processor from maybe 1987 (WriteNow) that's just fine, and continues to use it for day-to-day writing. Hey, whatever makes you comfy.
Maybe it isn't supported in some subtle ways, and I'm sure there's stuff that's broken -- even recent OS 9 games sometimes won't run in "Classic Mode" and require booting in OS 9 instead. But Apple's taken this seriously during every OS or chip migration they've ever had, and they're still keeping their eye on pre-PPC chip software.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Wichita, KS, eh? That's where I'm at... Send me an email.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
If Intel isn't spreading FUD about its 64 bit strategy, then this will be a turning point for AMD we will look back on in the future and say: "Wow Intel really screwed the pooch on that one".
;)
Fairly typical for ZDNet, Linux is either downplayed; or, as is the case in this article, ignored totally:
Currently, Itanium chips do not run regular Windows code well.
Windows software is designed to run on 32-bit systems.
'There hasn't been much OS support'.
Forget the number of years Linux has been running on a variety of 64 bit chips for years.
Articles like these are way too biased towards the Intel/Microsoft duopoly. I say go for it Intel, AMD can produce stable quality CPUs and you and Microsoft can say to each other: "No one will ever need more than 4GB of memory."
...is that their 64-bit solution requires a completely different instruction set. It's painful to switch to an Itanium from an x86 platform. On the other hand, AMD's 64-bit solution(x86-64) should be about as painless a transition as the move from 16-bit to 32-bit processors.
Of *course* Intel is going to argue that 64bit isn't required for desktop computers. If users make the leap to AMD's x86-64, Intel will have to scramble to build a chip of their own to support it. Also, if you start getting $100, $200, $300 64-bit chips out there, I'm sure the server market's gonna stop and ask "why the hell are we spending $10k per Itanium?"
Intel stands to lose if we move to 64-bit on desktops.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
No friggin way! They're going to go with AMD Opteron.
Cheap 64-bit computing is right around the corner, and Intel is going to be playing catch-up real soon now.
And with more and more people getting into editing their own videos, people are going to want 64-bit computing sooner than Intel is letting on.
Then again, I could be wrong. I'm wrong "alot" :)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Don't you think Intel will try to: - decrease market for desktop computers - increase market for notebooks - really increase market for embedded toys and gadgets - eventually and finally make my awfull, noisy 32-bits CPU disappear in my fat screenand be as powerfull while needing less power and no fan - try to recreate a gap between servers and desktop computers (no more P3 servers while we should sell Xeon servers) Don't you think intel is making a choice that is constructive? Where do we really need more bits? Hints: - file systems, no more 2Gigs limit. This alreadyexists on 32bits systems that are not sold by a certain Redmond firm. - video cards. No more 24 bits modes, welcome to 30 and 48bits! - digital camera: same thing. At least, please, do make some 24bits floating point pixels. More contrast please please please. And then I could buy one of those device. - sound. It already exists,but welcometocheap Envy24based sound cards! Intel SIMD extensions are far more useful than 64bits operations for most of people. At last Intel produces the Centrino, the first Intel chip I am impatient to see at work. Before to move toward the 64bits, we could try to improve our software, and try to take as much computtionnal power as we can from each Hz we have.
Just like CPU power, memory capacity is exceeding demand. I rememebr back in like 1993, I got a PC with 4MB in it. It was rpetty good for the day, but still I wanted more. I was always slamming into a memory wall. Then in 1998 I got a system with 128MB, a fair amount for the day. It was better now, I could run a number of apps together wiht minimal swapping but I was still limited. So some upgrades later we have the present day, where I have a gig. Now, memory is no issue, I can load whatever I like with no problems. I never deal with not having enough physical memory.
Now if you look at it historically, It was about the same amount of money for the 3 different ram points. However it isn't the same situation. Like I said, 4MB wasn't enough even for what I wanted to do then. 128MB was adiquate, but limiting. 1GB is more than a I need, half that would do fine and still not be very restrictive.
Microsoft is not ready with Win64.
"640K should be enough for anyone."
-Bill Gates
Now, tell me again why we don't need 64-bit CPUs?
Make that 4 billion
That's exactly what yerricde said, 4 billion cents.
Sing to the tune of the Beastie Boys "Ill communication": Like In-tel, we got the ill compu-tation
Um, Hi... this is Intel. We know you *WANT* 64 bit but, um, you dont NEED it. Really, you dont. You believe that? Great! Basically guys, this is the problem, we *screwed the pooch* on this processor. We've spent 10's of billions of dollars on development, it's years behind schedule, it ain't that fast, and the whole thing just sucks right now. So here's what we're gonna do, We're gonna hold back this technology for like ehh, 6, 7, maybe 8 years SO WE HAVE TIME TO RECOUP THE MONEY WE WASTED by selling the chip as an expensive "workstation" CPU. So, expensive high-profit workstations for now, then you can have it later once it sucks (well it already does, but once it sucks more). Other platforms have had 64 processors for a decade now you say? You want mid 90's processor technology in 2003? FUCK YOU, you can't have it, end of discussion!
OH, and expect some dirty tricks, we know AMD is gonna be ready to sell you 64 bit way before us, so, well ... you'll just see ;)
Thanks, Intel
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Apple:
- Well, now that they're most recently Going out of business, in steps IBM to save the day for them... a new line of iMacs is going to do insanely well, considering it's going to be the only fully-functional line of 64-bit personal computing, because I can pretty much guarantee Apple's going to have full-fledged 64-bit standardizing before anybody else. Apple's going to have an insane surge in users, a lot of the multimedia software that's been migrating to PCs is going to be happy with the better, faster and more powerful 64-bit hardware support and go back to developing for Macs... basically, Macs regain a lot of the status they've been falling behind in quickly.
AMD:
- Hammer sales go up! If they're really lucky, Intel will either do a harsh (and hopefully inferior) yet still more expensive knock-off of Hammer, or they're going to release Itanium in a hurry because they realize businesses like the idea of progress so they're starting to hop over to 64-bit architectures. So AMD will reclaim its status it lost about a year and a bit ago when the P4 got the title of "Best x86 on the market". Good on them.
Linux:
- Business as usual. Increased PPC support. Cool new Hammer patches, as well as the usual suspects (i386 still harshly dominating)
Microsoft:
- Well, maybe not everybody's jumping for joy... A lot of migration to PPC. But otherwise, they're still busy saying that "The Next New Windows Will Be Secure, And This Time We Mean It!" (tm).
That about it?
Karma: Non-Heinous
Even now I'm writing my chess engine for 64bit processors....
And the problem is not only 4G physical memory, but more than that, 4G physical address space. I've hit this boundry LOTs of times. While you don't have processor + OS support for a larger address space, there are certian jobs you could never do on a PC (ever tried to run gate-level simulations of large chips? Antenna and other microwave devices simulations? big spice simulations?.... doesn't intel know anything about scientific applications????)
Yet on the other hand, who needs a 3G pentimumIV with HT to run MS-Office?? Intel?
Nobody will ever need more than 4GB of memory :-)
It surprises me that no one (at least at the top level) has mentioned this, but for the short term, what excites me the most about AMD's 64-bit implementation is the addition of new registers that comes with AMD finally designing the ISA themselves.
0 0218)
Here are some general specs on x86-64:
64-bit addressing
8 Additional GPRs (for a total of 16)
GPR width increased to 64-bits
8 128-bit SSE registers (for a total of 16)
64-bit instruction pointer and relative addressing
Flat address space (code, data, stack)
--Ace's hardware (http://www.aceshardware.com/read_news.jsp?id=100
The fact that x86 has only had 8 General Purpose Registers has been the bane of its existence for quite a while... I think that this will be the main source of speed improvement over existing 32-bit apps when compiled for the x86-64 architecture, not the fact that the system can handle more precise numbers.
As far as selling these things, having worked in video game retail, the consumer is already very conscious of the idea of an n-bit processor from all the old console hype where the precision of the CPU was marketed as the primary "performance number" the way Mhz are on desktop PCs.
--Shon
Intel's 64 bit Itanium processor lacks 32 bit x86 compatibility instructions. Could the MS purchase of Connectix be an Intel insurance policy against AMD and IBM's push to get 64 bits to the desktop?
See more here
(and these should in essence be applicable for any other OS too):
Large Memory Support
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition supports up to 16 GB of RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory, enabling applications to run faster when working with large data sets. Applications can preload substantially more data into virtual memory, allowing rapid access by the Intel Itanium processor.
Optimized for the Intel Itanium processor family
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition has been optimized specifically for the Intel Itanium processor and benefits from its key features, such as the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) design and increased floating-point performance.
Multiprocessing
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition is designed to support multiprocessing capabilities for maximum performance and scalability, supporting up to two symmetric Intel Itanium processors.
Interoperability
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition provides a rich platform to integrate both 64-bit technical applications and 32-bit business applications using the Windows on Windows 64 (WOW64) x86 emulation layer.
Same programming model
Developers with 32-bit skills will be comfortable and quickly productive in the Windows on Itanium environment, finding it virtually identical to the development environment for 32-bit Windows.
- 18446744073709551616B
- 18014398509481984kB
- 17592186044416MB
- 17179869184GB
- 16777216TB
- 16384PB
- 16EB
in comparison, IPv6 has 128 bit addresses, so it can address 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 hosts. Boy, I can't wait 'till we have 4096 bit computing! Yes folks, you could address: 9498661542358172543497427893422576585907920607927"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Not anymore. With iMacs coming with decent video-editing tools, and consumer versions (only $300) of Final Cut, and other tools, Joe User is getting interested in this stuff.
Not to mention students in film school, etc. 64-bit procs sure could be useful to them in the near future.
I dunno though, I guess 4 GB is till enough for most Joe Users for now... But just wait for Windows XP 2004 3.1!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
That's why you have Java, which abstracts from the underlying system.
I still remember the days of 3dfx saying 16bit
:)
color was the way to go and 32bit color
wasn't really needed for anything since they did
24bit color internally...
Sounds a lot like intel now , with all their 32
bit hoo haw and some sort of 40bit addressing
in the pipeline !!!
All I want to say if YAHOO AMD !!!! I'm a firm
supporter of the and think they should have
much more bussiness outside of the home hobbyist.
So begins the down fall of the chipzilla monolith
IBM has a very good 64 bit CPU available. HP recently aquired the Alpha, SUN and SGI have 64 bit CPUs, thought apparently not very good ones. None will run windows software natively, but apparently neither will the intel one, so why not take this opportunity to dump the i86 architecture altogether?
What percentage of transistors on the PIV was devoted entirely to backwards compatibility again?
While no, I may not need 12gig of memory anytime soon, I do at times use my desktop (running your OS of choice) as a testing grounds for new software. When the companies servers are running a 64-bit OS, and I want to test a new patch for XYZ software or try out that new Oracle 12i...wouldn't it be nice to have the option of doing it on my "low-end" desktop?
You can have dissimilar address and data bus widths, you know. IIRC, the G4 address bus is actually already 36 bit.
And this my friends, is why we cannot get ANYONE to recognize this as a true science! ::sigh::
My long-term goal is to be running a fully-realistic, totally customizable and scalable universe with believability passing anything depicted in the matrix - in other words my own play universe. I already calculated that to run a sufficiently realistic emulated 'Earth' with everything simulated, people, plants, trees, mountains, rocks in realistic detail would take at least 10^30 ops/sec. I would certainly need several Zettabytes of memory to run it effectively.
So quite frankly, there is no such thing as too much RAM, Storage or Speed that I could need, assuming the software was developed to utilize it.
Planet P Blog
www.enthea.org
I take issue with that. Pipes have been binary clean for ages, before linux was even a thought.
Just because the wheel was designed in the stone age doesnt mean the wheel is obsolete as a concept. Stream based pipes are still ideal for certian tasks, and the GNU tools will always be useful.
ASCII is a dim memory, as *nix systems have long since moved to UNICODE/UTF-8 NF-C. In many ways linux has superior internationalization support as an operating system than even WindowsXP, which is stuck with the inferior UTF-16 legacy encoding model, BOMs, difficulties with surrogate pairs in many places, and scattershot support within the operating system itself.
Youre total misunderstanding of the unix architechture is a sure sign of weakness. It doesnt preclude COM or CORBA or other higher level I/O methods whatsoever. The unix filesystem as a concept can be used with ACLs or capabilities as well as the normal unix permissions.
Like they say, "Those who dont understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly"
gets a downward compatible 64 but chip on the desktop wins...but for some reason AMD thinks it has a presence in the server market in needs to hold onto ?!?!?! Does anyone out there use AMD chips in high end servers ? I thought Intel/HP/SUN owned that niche.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
A new standard for applications. Not effective, light weight, maintainable, fast, open source, secure, or easy to use. Ornate!
Dude, that application is ORNATE!
I know that's why I'm going to switch to 64 bit.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
IIRC, when the statement was made, most applications were still tiny. Somewhere I have a WordPerfect 1.0 card promotional card, it ran in 64K. Early versions of CAD were the big memory gobblers.
It would be years before such a statement would appear arrogant, if not ill considered. More embarassing would be the absence of the Internet in The Road Ahead. Such a visionary. There's also that great comment about the Mac being a better computer or the operating sytem being better, or whatever he said, but that was captured on video tape, which would be damning to refute.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But they should hurry, because we all know how important it is to get a pointer to the combined memory of every PC as quickly as possible.
Oh, and while we're at it, let's make the entire current software library obsolete too. Hooray for obsolete.
sigh...
LadyStar - Your Magical and Mysterious Adventure Awaits
Well, now that they're most recently Going out of business [slashdot.org], in steps IBM to save the day for them... a new line of iMacs is going to do insanely well, considering it's going to be the only fully-functional line of 64-bit personal computing, because I can pretty much guarantee Apple's going to have full-fledged 64-bit standardizing before anybody else. Apple's going to have an insane surge in users, a lot of the multimedia software that's been migrating to PCs is going to be happy with the better, faster and more powerful 64-bit hardware support and go back to developing for Macs... basically, Macs regain a lot of the status they've been falling behind in quickly.
I wouldn't bet the farm on this. The iMac was and is marketed at the average non-geek who couldn't care about CPU bit path, or memory addressing, or upgradability. And it probably will still be marketed at the non-geek when they go 64 bit.
Now the full on tower machines, those will be the machines to get for hot 64 bit CPU sex. not as cheap as the iMacs are, but they're a whole lot cheaper than say a Sun sparc machine, or other 64 bit box.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Granted, the 'professional' looking bit is subjective, but the quality out of those two programs is considerably higher than PowerPoint or Front Page Express (having used those progrems). Arguably the quality and character of the movies those programs can create is dictated more by the footage and the skill of the user, but it's still very, very, good, for the price (less than $3k)
GPL Deconstructed
Currently, desktop and notebook processors like the Pentium 4 are 32-bit chips, meaning that they process data in 32-bit chunks; 64-bit chips can process data in 64-bit chunks.
Nope. The only thing that makes a 64-bit processoor "64-bit" is a flat 64 bit memory address space (in practice some subset of 64 bit). P3, P4 and Athlon all have many 64+ bit features, including instructions, registers, and memory transfers (data, not address).
Pretty sad that the article hasn't been fixed by now.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I wonder what kind of volume would be necessary to hold eighteen exabytes of RAM? Of course, this question doesn't even consider interconnects and a bus to the outside world... --M
You're mixing up 3 classes of computing machines.
... processors". This is not a mainframe, this is a different category. They also generally have very high inter-cpu memory transfer rates, for handling dependent parallel computations.
:)
Supercomputers are almost purely cpu number-crunching beasts. This is what you seem to think of as mainframes with "over a thousand
Most mainframes, like IBM's Z Series, have 24 to 36 CPUS. A mainframe is not about cpu performance, a mainframe is about data. A mainframe has system data throughput that puts almost any other system to shame. Historically, mainframes are good at supporting many simultaneously-connected users doing data queries and updates. (Yes, they run huge databases very well.)
And then you get Beowulf clusters (your Google remark, effectively), which are really chasing the supercomputer market, and not the mainframe market. Beowulf clusters care about a limited class of supercomputer applications, they are good where you need a lot of parallel number crunching, and have very little data dependency between parallel calculations, so you don't need a lot of inter-cpu communications.
Pick the type that's right for your job, and you'll be happy. Pick the wrong one, and you'll have nothing but problems.
And it helps if you're stuck-up intelligently, that way people will still hate you, but won't think you're stupid any more.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
I'd like to see one of two systems. Either provide backward compatibility - like AMD with it's 64 bit extensions, or start with a clean slate and produce a performer - like Digital's Alpha.
The advantage of a 64 bit AMD is that the most used architecture can migrate without dropping everything. My PII can still run DOS binaries that ran on my 8088. This is a GOOD thing. Even running Linux, I don't want to recompile all my apps, if I don't have to. If this were the case, I might have gotten a Power PC already.
The advantage that the Alpha has is speed, and there is only one kernel systems calls interface - 64 bits. For example, there's no lseek() and lseek64() on the Alpha. (For the history buf, first there was seek() for 16 bits, then lseek() for 32 bits. We've been here before. Now we have the off_t typedef, so it should be easier to simply change it to be 64 bits... Yet some have added off64_t, in the name of backwards compatibility.)
Itanium may have the clean break (or it may not), but where's the speed? I'm not switching without something.
Digital's Alpha is at least the third attempt that Digital made before getting a RISC system to perform. The Power architecture is IBM's 2nd attempt. Sometimes you design it, and it just doesn't deliver. Move on!
When one looks at Digital's switch from 16 bits (PDP-11) to 32 bits (Vax 11/780), one notes that the new machines were more expensive, and about the same performance. I'd still rather have a Vax, because there are things that you can do in 32 bits that are painful in 16 (but not many).
It should be noted that throwing the address space at problems often slows it down. For example, Gosling's Emacs was ported from the Vax to the PDP-11. On the Vax, the file being edited was thrown into RAM completely. On the PDP, just a few blocks of your file were in RAM, in a paged manner. On the PDP, an insert (or delete) cause only the current page to be modified. If the current page filled up, it was split, and a new page was created. On the Vax, inserts tended to touch every page of the file - which could make the whole machine page. It was quite obviously faster on the PDP-11. No one cares about this example anymore - since machines have so much more RAM and speed. But, throwing the address space at video editing will show how bad this idea really is. Programmed I/O is smarter than having the OS do it. The program knows what it's doing, and the OS doesn't. Eventually, machines may have enough RAM and speed that no one will care, but it won't happen here at the begining of the curve.
One problem that has not been solved is the memory management unit TLB. This is the table on the chip that translated between physical and virtual memory. With 16 bits of address, 256 byte pages require only 256 entries to cover the whole address space. For 32 bit processors, the page table just doesn't fit on the chip. So, the TLB is a translation cache, and on cache miss, the OS must be called to fill it.
An alternative is to use extent lists. On my Linux system, the OS manages to keep my disk files completely contiguous 99.8% of the time. If this were done for RAM, then the number of segments that would be needed for a typical process would be small - possibly as few as four. One for text (instructions), one for initialized read only data, one for read/write data, BSS and the heap, and one for the stack. You'd need one for each DLL (shared library), but IMO, shared libraries are more trouble than they're worth, and ought to be abandoned. Removing any possibility of TLB misses would improve performance, and take much of the current mystery out of designing high performance software.
For this to work, you need the hardware vendor to produce appropriate hardware, and have at least one OS support it. The risk factor seems to have prevented this from happening so far...
-- Stephen.
This is pure FUD at its best.
My father has a word processor from maybe 1987 (WriteNow) that's just fine
I still regret, and probably always will, that I didn't buy a complete boxed copy of XyWrite that I saw for sale at a used bookstore years ago.
As we all know, AMD's new 64-bit processor is backwards compatible with 32-bit programs. Intel's is not. Once Microsoft releases its new 64-bit version of XP, AMD's will be ready for the desktop. Intel's will not.
Is anyone surprised that Intel is claiming that we don't need 64-bit desktop computing?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I think that the iMac would be marketable to the general geek, though... it quite possibly could be the flagship for fully integrated 64-bit hardware, don't you think? Maybe not necessarily the iMac, I guess, but they definately could pull out a bit like they did with the G4 Cube or something like that...
In any case, I think Steve Jobs won't have too much of a problem marketing the 64-bit processor in a happy little package that'll be the "first ever 64-bit fully supported system for the personal computer" or something like that....
Karma: Non-Heinous
I'm confused: isn't the G4 chip capable of delivering 128-bit processing with its "Velocity Engine"? I was shocked to hear when I visited the Apple store that they were using 128-bit processors when the PC world was just starting to hear of 64-bit chips, and I was skeptical that it was true, but the guy at the store assured me. Also Apple seems to confirm: http://www.apple.com/powerbook/processor.html
What's the deal?
It seems to me that Microsoft has been working of the 64-bit version of Windows since 1996. A quick check of Googleconfirms this. And now this guy says that no one has done any work towards writting software for it? This does not compute. I think that MS is losing the 64-bit market, and doesn't even realize it.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
"in steps IBM to save the day for them... a new line of iMacs is going to do insanely well, considering it's going to be the only fully-functional line of 64-bit personal computing, because I can pretty much guarantee Apple's going to have full-fledged 64-bit standardizing before anybody else"
/. - we've got it bad enough here as it is.
You guarantee this? You can tell the future, or what? IBM won't have finished the PowerPC 970 until 2H 03 (that's their current estimate, and they've been IIRC pretty good at meeting estimates), and so there's no way Apple will have finished a mobo and started shipping until at least 2Q 04, which will probably be many months after the Hammer.
"Hammer sales go up! If they're really lucky, Intel will either do a harsh (and hopefully inferior) yet still more expensive knock-off of Hammer, or they're going to release Itanium in a hurry because they realize businesses like the idea of progress so they're starting to hop over to 64-bit architectures. So AMD will reclaim its status it lost about a year and a bit ago when the P4 got the title of "Best x86 on the market". Good on them."
Itanium was out like a year and a half ago, Itanium 2's been out for a few months. Itanium, however, isn't x86, so I'm missing the relevance.
Please try to know something about the topic if you're going to try to make predictions about it. I know being a Mac fanboy is your bread and butter, but keep it off
what we need is faster ram..harddrive ....pci bus...etc.....who cares about cpus anymore
Right back at you for the whole Mac Fanboy bit... I'm a linux fanboy if anything.
Anyways... Apple's going to have the hardware support before anybody else. Most of the power-users who work off of x86 architecture will tend to upgrade their computers rather than buy a brand new system, which means a bit of lag between the Hammer and the hardware support for it. One of the main advantages that apple has over everybody else is their general control over the hardware in their systems. As a result, they can pump out machines with high-quality fully-integrated systems (READ: SYSTEMS, not chips... there's a lot more to it than just the processor) for 64-bit processing faster than x86 companies will most likely be able to.
I'll concede the Itanium shit. I tried to look up the Itanium 2 stuff, got confuzzled and tried to interpolate the rest. My apologies for my presumptuousness.
Karma: Non-Heinous
...well, I guess he just might get his wish.
Intel's claims are wholly out of touch with reality.
On a daily basis we're running into the Windows 2GB barrier with our next-generation content development and preprocessing tools.
If cost-effective, backwards-compatible 64-bit CPU's were available today, we'd buy them today. We need them today. It looks like we'll get them in April.
Any claim that "4GB is enough" or that address windowing extensions are a viable solution are just plain nuts. Do people really think programmers will re-adopt early 1990's bank-swapping technology?
Many of these upcoming Opteron motherboards have 16 DIMM slots; you can fill them with 8GB of RAM for $800 at today's pricewatch.com prices. This platform is going to be a godsend for anybody running serious workstation apps. It will beat other 64-bit workstation platforms (SPARC/PA-RISC/Itanium) in price/performance by a factor of 4X or more. The days of $4000 workstation and server CPU's are over, and those of $1000 CPU's are numbered.
Regarding this "far off" application compatibility, we've been running the 64-bit SuSE Linux distribution on Hammer for over 3 months. We're going to ship the 64-bit version of UT2003 at or before the consumer Athlon64 launch. And our next-generation engine won't just support 64-bit, but will basically REQUIRE it on the content-authoring side.
We tell Intel this all the time, begging and pleading for a cost-effective 64-bit desktop solution. Intel should be listening to customers and taking the leadership role on the 64-bit desktop transition, not making these ridiculous "end of the decade" statements to the press.
If the aim of this PR strategy is to protect the non-existant market for $4000 Itaniums from the soon-to-be massive market for cost-effective desktop 64-bit, it will fail very quickly.
-Tim Sweeney, Epic Games
Today, you get a 2 Ghz machine for $300 (no monitor). I can't imagine there is a lot of demand for a 64-bit desktop, not enough to justify the expense.
Still, I sure could use one to encode my Divx!
There is currently no "killer app" there that will make Joe Consumer salivate over a 64 bit system with 16 gigs of RAM. One would argue that animation production and movie editing would definitely benefit, but that's way beyond the average user's needs. So what will make the average net surfer and gamer *want* to switch other than a concerted effort to render 32 bits obsolete? Anyone has an idea? This could be a real opportunity.
Sure, unless the rumors are true, and Athlon64 ends up costing about the same as AthlonXP. Multi-CPU boards (in 2 processor config) will be cheaper than Dual AthlonMP boards, because of the use of hypertransport, thus the lack of a need for explicit SMP support in one's chipset. It's simply handled by the bus and the OS.
In that case, you can expect dual Athlon64 systems at ~2.5GHz to be significantly cheaper and in the same performance neighborhood, probably better at some things, slower at others.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If your a company and you make alot fat profits on your server chips(64bits & Xeons) , you don't want the price of those products going down. It's done all the time in the business. They keep their fastest line of processors out of the hands of the mainstream public so can charge triple the prices to rich corporate buyers that want the latest and best. I am just wondering how long Intel will wait to bring out an affordable Itanium. Any guesses?
Interesting that Windows 2003 is going to Release to Manufacture (RTM) with support for the Itanium but not for AMD's x86-64
Is run at least as fast as current top-end chips, emulate 32-bit operation successfully enough not to crash current code (read: games), and cost not much more than the most expensive current desktop chip, and it will become the de facto standard.
That's how it works. Intel knows that. They're making a huge mistake not taking on AMD directly in the niche.
Unless they also know that AMD is full of stripped screws and has a buggy, slow, hot, super-expensive productt that will only make them look foolish, even if they are before their time.
I mean, how many Newtons does Apple sell anymore?
Um..that's not quite correct...maybe you're on a :P
4 73 837803842334832839\7 558340890106714439262 837987573438185793\7 654370999834036159013 438371831442807001\6 723346843445866174968 079087058037040712\8 029006686938976881787 785946905630190260\9 644305902501597239986 771421554169383555\0 878118726394964751001 890413490084170616\9 550769983616369411933 015213796825837188\2 555022599830041234478 486259567449219461\3 800876086221028342701 976982023131690176\0 285375124784014907159 135459982790513399\7 288427979155484978295 432353451706522326\6 877828789484406160074 129456749198230505\2 916136926708342856440 730447899971901781\9 599609079946920177462 481771844986745565\8 075682218465717463732 968849128195203174\8 411929804522981857338 977648103126085903\1 113160292078173803343 609024380470834040\
32 bit machine
it should be..
10443888814131525066917527107166243825799642490
5390797155745684882681193499
6072632360878513652779459569
1855946226376318839397712745
8404874011860911446797778359
9405995794534328234693030266
9885291486318237914434496734
7509366833385055103297208826
0918336567512213184928463681
7023806505913245610825731835
7800667519548507992163641937
6115517942711068311340905842
9061394905987693002122963395
7164237715481632138063104590
4657634732238502672530598997
9250178329070473119433165550
5700244092661691087414838507
0013024134671897266732164915
3154190336
Yes, but that's the number of bytes, not terrabytes like I said.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
I completely agree. We have 30 years of research and many orders of magnitude increase in computing power and yet the Open Source movement's claim to fame is the creation of cheap knockoffs of 1970s software.
I use Linux for many things because it's the best tool we have for those things, but I think that's a pretty sad statement frankly....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
There are a lot more reasons to use 64-bits than just letting programs use more than 4GB of memory:
1. 64-bit machines essentially turn conservative garbage collectors into precise garbage collectors because the chance of pointer misidentification becomes almost vanishingly small with address space so much larger than live memory. The ability to automatically garbage collect all your legacy C/C++ programs is a huge benefit.
2. Programs are now often constrained more by memory bandwidth into the ALU than by processing speed. Using 64-bit operands can help this dramatically.
Because this is an Intel discussion, I feel that it is necessary that I post reference to this article:
0 5/020521_Intel _Subverts/020521_Intel_Subverts.htm
"How Intel subverts journalists"
www.vanshardware.com/articles/2002/
I guess my point is that hundreds of millions of dollars are going to R&D for superfast processors, but the software industry (thankfully) isn't coming up for any mainstream uses for such a powerful processor. I say thankfully because North America has had about all of the mindless consumerism it can handle.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
That's what MMX and other x86 processor extensions are doing already. Applying operations to larger chunks of data than 32 bit, in a single clock.
I would hate to go back to the bad old days of custom OSs for games. DOS4g plus a game was never a very stable platform, and if the game crashed so did my computer. Even if the game didn't crash exiting the game required a reboot. Now when I exit a game my OS is instantly ready to do work, and if the game crashes my OS often survives.
Just a couple of nitpicks.
The motherboard manufacturers themselves have been saying they're waiting for AMD to release Athlon 64 to the market, and with Opteron due on April 22nd, I expect AMD to support it themselves (they've done it before with the Athlon and Athlon MP, they'll do it again for Opteron). Which means there will be very little lag if any at all.
Even though Apple has control over systems, they'll have to get chips from IBM first to design chipsets around--or get contractors to do that. So unless Apple's already decided, I doubt they're going to get chips until IBM starts sampling to anybody who wants some to test for a platform, and who knows exactly when that will be, and it will take even more time to design the rest of the platform if Apple wants their own platform solution rather then adapt some of their interface to the reference solution.
So, when's lunch?
When GnuCash was ported to Alpha, IIRC, the porters ran into issues where C pointers where converted into guile and back again. It wasn't that hard to fix, though.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It seems to me that Intel has the worst of all worlds as far as upgrade paths go, doesn't it?
AMD's x86-64 chips will run old 32-bit code or new 64-bit code, so they don't have an upgrade path problem, it would seem.
IBM's PPC architecture was designed with 64 bits in mind in the first place, so the 32-bit code we have now should work seamlessly on 64-bit arches, shouldn't it? I'm no processor engineer, but it seems that that would be a benefit of having designed the architecture with 64 bit in mind is a bonus.
Another poster mentioned that many upcoming Opteron boards have 16 DIMM slots (which is absolutely crazy awesome, especially for incremental upgrades). The PPC 960 design features a 450 MHz DDR bus, pushing bus bandwidth to 900 MHz (for which the memory, I expect, will be crazy expensive, but still). I don't know what the Opteron bus is like, nor what Apple's 960-based systems will feature, but even if not much else changes, these are already compelling reasons to upgrade along an easy path. Both can address 2097152 terabytes of memory (by my calculations), so you can memory-map large files (or entire RAID arrays).
So what does Intel bring? A slower processor that costs more, does less, and is incompatible? The choice seems clear to me.
It sure seems to me that Intel is going to be very grateful for the die-hards, because they're going to be the only thing that matters.
--Dan
'There hasn't been much OS support'
Forget the number of years Linux has been running on a variety of 64 bit chips [google.com] for years.
Articles like these are way too biased towards the Intel/Microsoft duopoly.
Seriously, how large markedshare does Linux have on the desktop? Slim. And there's no magical benefits that'll upset the balance between Windows and Linux when going from 32 to 64 bit either. You can either try to make people move from 32 bit desktops to 64 bit desktops, which is what AMD is doing. Or you can try to make them move from Windows to Linux desktops, which seems to be what you're interested in. But I really don't think those two goals have much in common, and as such I don't think they belong in the same article.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Didn't think about AMD's 64 bit solution. Sounds like what I should upgrade to when my current machine slowly becomes obsolete. I feel so sad, it's a 1.266 GHz p3. it shouldn't BE obsolete.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The only chip that can threaten the Itanium II, III, etc. is the Power4, but it is nowhere to be seen on the desktop.
I'm gonna see this one out (cuz I'm a stubborn bastard)
See, Motherboards are one thing.
Video cards, sound cards, ethernet cards and a whole thwack of peripherals are something entirely different.
Sure, AMD or whoever might make a couple, but more often than not these won't be as powerful as the type of stuff ATI, Creative Labs, etc. are hoping to make. And I'm willing to bet, the people who really want to exploit the use of 64-bit processing are going to want to use those moreso than the AMD hack-n-slash clones... _That_ is the type of hardware support I'd expect Apple to have before AMD does.
I dunno. I might be wrong.... these are just my humble predictions... but I stand by 'em.
Karma: Non-Heinous
I don't understand how it would be projected significantly cheaper? We have absolutely nothing to base the price of the ppc970 on yet...
I live in a giant bucket.
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Complexity. RISC chips have many MORE instructions, but they are all very small.
Begun, this browser war has.
4 Gigs of ram out of be enough for anybody... :-)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Even without having 4GB of memory installed, it is still very useful to have a 64-bit address space. Imagine being able to mmap() your entire hard drive at once! The filesystem would just simply treat the entire disk as a big data structure in virtual memory, copying when needed, instead of having to issue read and write calls to the disk. This will provide a huge performance increase.
AGP and PCI cards, especially newer video cards, are also getting big. These need to have address space allocated to them. Even with a 64-bit PCI card, Linux still surprisingly allocates address space in 32-bit memory (the lower 4GB). If 4GB of RAM is installed, Linux must create a "hole" for PCI cards and such, as there isn't enough address space for all the RAM plus the PCI cards. This reminds me of the bad old days of ISA, where the expansion cards had to sit between 640K and 1M, creating a hole between the first 1M and all later memory. This hole still exists!
And finally, there's lots of good reasons to have a huge address space that provides room enough for everything on the system at once. No need to decode multiple memory maps and translate between them. It would be a boon to things involving virtual memory, multiple programs, data transfer between programs, and so on.
BTW, I use a machine at work with 4GB of memory installed. It's running Linux 2.4. Even with HIGHMEM enabled, it is still a mess, because we need that memory to be available to the kernel and PCI devices, and not just in user space. Linux is very good at doing page table tricks with PAE (Physical Address Extensions) for user programs, but this isn't true in kernel space. I'm looking forward to real 64-bit machines!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
The price is intended to be (or was announced to be) comparable to dual AthlonMP, and current 32 bit Dual-G4 Power Macintosh systems are more expensive than they are. It stands to reason that the 64 bit PowerPC processors will be at least as expensive as their 32 bit ancestors-to-be.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why not try the reverse approach: Have a "ram disk" and use the database to manage boat-loads of stuff instead of RAM addresses.
Databases solve everything
Table-ized A.I.
You guys spent too much time on those posts :)
um no.
Moto chips are expensive as hell, and the current top of the line are overclocked.
Apple is trying to make lemonade out of lemons atm, but it's really hard to do that and stay profitable.
Lots of vendors had 32bit chips before the 80386. Intel was very late to the party. And until the 80386, Intel's processors were a bad joke.
Bearing in mind the fact that Intel does have a much larger marketshare than AMD in almost every area they're competing with each other, don't you think Intel isn't THAT STUPID. That they can spend top dollars to hire marketing people, and engineering people who are the best in their fields. That they know after hours and weeks and months of researching that the Athlon 64 isn't going to pose that big of a threat. Intel hasn't been wrong yet, sure the original Athlons were faster than the Pentium 3's, and the early P4's, but the Pentium 4 is pretty much undisputable at the time now. Nevermind should we forget the fact that last time, Intel actually made a profit in this bad economy, and that AMD has their Texas factory as collateral for further loans as they continue to lose money. Folks, they're not stupid.
This is great, and we would do more, but:
How the heck do you develop 64-bit software for that on your
- laptop
?You need commodity pricing for this stuff because its not just the production servers you're paying for, there's all the development hardware too.
Development these days tends to be focused on creating a personalised high productivity environment for the developer - i.e. on his desktop or laptop PC.
Developer PCs are (next to gaming PC's) the most high spec PCs people buy.
I want a 64bit development PC with 16GB of memory, thanks.
Intel should have quit Itanium when they'd only spent $500 million on R&D :-)
Bus Error (core dumped)
That is just outright STUPID. Do you have any sources to back that up?
I need 64-bit stuff as WELL DUDES, with the x86-64 will give massive memory support, excellent FPU performance which the Athlon is good at. This gives my SPICE simulations some muscle.
Haven't you ever heard of porting ?
You won't be seeing good development tools either in a very long time so you better get used to this 'p'-word. Actually it is easy and it tends to make you think twice before writing your code... I have my potion of this stuff every day.
time_t on many systems is a 32 bit signed integer that counts the number of seconds since (for instance) midnight of January 1,1970. This counter will rollover about February of 2038 (I don't remember the exact number, but it would be easy enough to find out), which might theoretically create some problems (anyone remember Y2K?). Of course, even with 64-bit times, we still have to worry about the year 5 billion or so iirc :-)
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
It seems to me that if the computer industry is going to change from 32bit x86, then this should be the point that they should move to a better IS. Is x86 something that need extending? It is old and inefficient for modern software, most modern processors spend a great deal of time working around the limitations of x86.
I think(personal oppinion) that this is a good point to move up to a modern IS, not necessarilt RISC but most likely.
From what i have read, im not a big fan of VLIW but it may be a good idea, other than the fact that the only VLIW processor out is a mamoth Itanic that is more efficient as a space heater than a CPU(maybe crusoe is VLIW?)
And if Backwards compatability is an issue, a hardware translator could be implemented that would allow x86 instructions to be translated(not emulated) into native instructions, similar to what the crusoe does.
linux would be great for this kind of processor, if the translator were a rom/ram chip, programmable on the fly, then the kernel could boot up in native IS and then load modules for different IS from disk. Essentially allowing the computer to be any computer out.
The crusoe does this VERY VERY well. And if performance is an arguement for you consider than a 1Ghz crusoe is ~athlon600 or so, and also consider that it has 1/3 the transistor count and great power features. take some time, up the transistor count, implement some good hardware Floating Point/SimD instructions that can easily handle translated sse/mmx/altivec/etc..OR native SimD.
--
of coarse the disadvantage is that the translated instructions would not be as fast as native instructions, but with good caching algorithyms and prediction units, and a good compiler that can to a considerable amount of translating on compile time(quasi-native executables, very simple "ports" to the new IS) this should be minimal. Most major production houses could offer simple patches with these "compiler ports" to allow a quick performance improvement while porting their software over to native IS.
--
emulators(really Virtual Processor Environments) would also become a "usable" means of running software, as running PPC code would be as simple as loading a module and an environmrent interface for memory and disk systems, something than current emulators due well but fall short on processor emulation.
-a boot loader to pick up a PPC module and then load OSX, or load x86/sparc/whatever.
-give us a chance to get away from x86 and also pc bios and into a better system.
==
excuse the long post, and have a good morning.
Mac Airways:
The cashiers, flight attendants and pilots all look the same, feel the same
and act the same. When asked questions about the flight, they reply that you
don't want to know, don't need to know and would you please return to your
seat and watch the movie.
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