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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."
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).
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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.
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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...
Of course, if you want real hardware agnosticism, there is always Linux isn't there? That runs on 64 bit CPUs, in 64 bit mode right now, and should be ready to work on AMD's Hammer right from launch. The big gamble for Intel is, can it afford to be late to the party? Intel certainly seems to think so, but I think that the Hammer is going to end up on more desktops than they expect, unless AMD sets the price of entry too high.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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).
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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).
In case you're wondering about constants: the PPC only supports loads of 16bit immediate values (both in the lower and upper 16bits of the lower 32bits of a register), so to load a 64bit value you may have to perform up to 5 operations (two loads, a shift and two more loads). So a PPC requires up to 64bits for a 32bit immediate load and up to 160bits to load a 64bit value (unless you store such a value in a memory location that can be addressed in a faster way). These are worst cases however, and in a lot of cases 1 or maybe two instructions is enough.
The main downside of 64bit code is that all pointers become 64bit, so all pointer loads and stores indeed require twice as much storage and bandwidth.
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Little late asking that question.
I've heard that Microsoft is developing an Athlon 64/Opteron native version of Windows XP; if that is true then gaming companies involved with PC-based games may be already creating games that run in native Athlon 64/Opteron 64-bit mode under Windows XP as I type this.
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.
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
I know amount of addressable memory is quite high, but isn't all the memory currently accessed via a bus thus sharing memory bandwidth?
;)
That is true, but the memory bus can be made wider, and that won't affect the adressing scheme. Take nVidia's nForce, it uses 2 DIMM slots in paralell to double the memory bandwidth (although the processor bus must be fast enough to use the bandwidth).
The bandwidth issue scales much more easily than the fact that 32 bits is 4 GB of addressable memory, no matter what. (OK, you can do a extended-memory-kludge, but that's beside the point
.: Max Romantschuk
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.
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?
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