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Linus Has Harsh Words For Itanium
Anonymous Coward writes "As a follow up to the earlier story "Intel: No Rush to 64-bit Desktop"... In words that Intel are likely to be far from happy with, the Finnish luminary has stuck the boot into Itanium. His responses to some questions on processor architecture are sure to be music to AMD's ears. Linus, in an Inquirer interview concludes: "Code size matters. Price matters. Real world matters. And ia-64... falls flat on its face on ALL of these."" Of course, Linus works for a chip maker ;)
... why does this fall under the AMD topic again? Shouldnt it be Intel or a Tux penguin topic?
and go Linus! first was Wintel and now maybe a LinMD to balance it out
Itanium 2 is a great architecture. I don't care what Linus says about it. Sure, it is not cheap to buy or to deploy, but speaking strictly from the technological point of view, Itanium2 kicks a$$ in its range.
Transmeta 64 bit chip coming out??
Remember when they were blowing smoke up everybody's ass about how they were going to revolutionize everything?
Where's Linus's hard words on that?
And slashdot could have beeen responsible enough not to run this trollbait.
Not to mention the fact that most home users won't see a 2X performance boost from 64 bits.
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
Not only does he work for a chip maker, he's like totally obsessed with the i386 architecture. I guess it's what he cut his teeth and and he's going to stick with it. But to think that no-one else has a use for it is very short-sighted.
...
It'll probably still make it into the kernel, though. I mean, alpha and sun architectures are in there, so
E000-VB14-G8RY
Was recently considering leaving the CPU business altogether. I wonder if the groundswell of support that is slowly building around their 64-bit CPU has changed their minds? Of course, it appears that they have "bet the house" on the Hammer and barring any disasterous product launch or systemic defects they are positioned well. Damn, if only I had a couple of grand to gamble in the stock market.....
This is from the Linux-Kernel mailing list, not an Inquirer interview. Here is the post.
Wow, just about everything under one topic. Linux, AMD, and Intel. So by this we are going to have 64-bit processors soon, is that what I'm hearing? Or will this turn out to be like most computer issues and come out a few years from now?
FOML: Rise to Power
I guess this means no more visits to Intel sites to spread love. Sigh...
this would have been first post, since there is a movie compiling in the background
that's funny.
"Linus Torvalds, Itanium "threw out all the good parts of the x86""
You know? That says it all right there.
Now, we all know that the Itanium isn't everything it's cracked up to be, and I think none of us at are wrong in blaming intel for coming out with a lousy product....
But, isn't one of those situations he mentions in the interview (namely, running a large database server) what this chip is designed to be doing?
As I recall, the IA64 isn't designed for the desktop user... In fact, desktop users probably don't even need 64 processing for a number of years still....
Yet we're attacking Intel for making the chip to fit it's niche?
Perhaps we need to be more fair in the context of the usefulness of the chip, instead of considering it in all contexts and criticizing it based on that?
Linus being opinionated and brash? Never!
Now I'm no programming guru, but it seems to me that the x86-64 architecture is a great one. In fact, the only thing that I could see being done to improve it would be to add more general purpose registers. I believe that the new registers are all GP (IIRC), but I think that makeing them ALL GP (even the older ones) would be good, and maybe bring up the number of registers to a good round 32 or something. Am I missing something glaring wrong? If you're going to toss out all of the x86 stuff (like ia-64), I think you should be able to emulate it in hardware about as fast as current x86 processors can. When Apple switched to PPC, couldn't they emulate 68k code about as fast (or at least faster than 1/2 the speed of) the fastest 68k chips?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
While posted on The Inquirer, this was not an interview, it was sourced from a discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list. See Here
Regards
RDK
The best architecture is still VAX. Clearly string operations at the processor levels is what any procesor needs to be the best and fastest ;}
the fact that linus works for a chip maker doesnt really matter because he dosn't develop the chips. he gets paid there to develop the linux kernel.
Worse is better
although the original essay talks about Unix and the LISP machines, it just keeps being true. Linus talks about the "charming oddities", well there you go: worse is better. Try for perfection, and the real world will eat you alive.
I also think he's right about the masses being what matter; I think Intel is still thinking about the data centre, not Joe Sixpack, with Itanium.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
As much as we depend on intel to push cpu manufacturing techniques to new heights, they have fallen down in the desktop market anyway. Ive lost count on how many new units they've added for poor lowlevel optimizers to keep up with. This with the slap in the face of reduced instructions per tic in the p4 so they could juice up the multiplier and sell "faster"mhz cpu's at double the price is more than enuf for me to stop watching them. Im far more interested in the new power5 coming out of IBM for a 64bit architecture to pay attention to. BTW, what ever happened to alpha 21364? is a 64bit cpu really newsworthy?
"It's worth noting that Torvalds' employer, Transmeta, has licensed x86-64 so he is likely to have access to Hammer hardware." This sounds really interesting. Any ideas what it means?
Of course, Linus works for a chip maker
And if trends continue, it could be Old Dutch.
I don't get it...
mickey mouse costume == M$FT?
please explain
So he is more likely to know what he's talking about.
Personally, I'm getting a bit tired of all the inane cynicism that passes for reflective commentary in modern society. While it's true that the world has its villians, it is more true that people often just hold opinions irrespective of their economic interest. I for one, trust that Linus is among these favored many.
(Not joking this time)
Linux in the tabloid press...who would have figured?
what will the 'masses' do with a 64-bit processor? the best reason to move up to 64bits is to increase maximum memory, and althought memory is now cheap, its not that cheap!
32bit processors can have up to 4GB of RAM. The most memory i know someone to have is 1GB, and computers most often come with half of that, 512MB. We still have a long way before we hit the 4GB ceiling (a long while!).
I am actually a tad worried for AMD, since they plan on coming out with the x86-64 pretty soon. And i dont know who will actually buy it (or need to buy it).
64bit processors belong where they are most needed, specialized machines.
what is nailchipper?
Sun has an interesting( biased) peace on Itanium. If I were buying a server I would avoid Itanium like the plauge. It is possible that Intel could even cancel the whole project and leave customers high and dry. Not to mention software availability is a problem.
I prefer the risc architecture. I like the idea of keeping things simple and efficient which is alot like structured programming. VLIW does not follow this ethic.
http://saveie6.com/
It needs a mass market OS to make use of it - like Windows.
Trouble is Windows runs on i386 and uh uh uh, it runs on i386 and uh uh uh. Well, it only runs on souped up versions of the 80386, and I'll bet it'll never run on anything else.
Linus is just telling Intel to hump itself. He's just spitting in Andy Grove's eye because Andy married Intel to MS. Sucka, I told you so.
Can't say I disagree with Linus's logic, but I don't know if this was that great of a decision politically-speaking. It might not matter, but if anything linux *needs* support from big players like Intel and vice versa in order to grow. This won't necessarily hurt, but I doubt it can help matters on the Intel front.
The Inquirer.com isn't exactly a bastion of responsible reporting.
It doesn't look like an interview took place at all. It looks like they took some choice quotes out of context from the kernel development mailing list to spur some pageviews.
Yea, and I bet that if Linus were to jump off the empire state building...
Netcraft confirms it: Itanium is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleagured Itanium community when Slashdot confirmed that Linus thinks Intel dropped the ball with Itanium. Itanium now powers 0.00% or all servers. Coming on the heels of a Netcraft survey which plainly states that Itanium has gained absolutely NO market share. This reenforces what we've known all along: Itanium is collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Itanium's future. The writing is on the wall: Itanium faces a bleak future, in fact there won't be any future at all because Itanium is dying. Intel has dumped millions into Itanium, red ink flows like a river of blood.
All major surveys show that Itanium has steadily held its ground at 0.00% use while millions of other processors are produced daily. If Itanium is to survive at all it will be among CPU dilettante dabblers and hangers-on. Nothing short of a miracle could save Itaniu, at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Itanium is dead.
Trolling is a art,
Did anybody notice a 2X performance boost moving from Windows 3.1 on 16bit MS-DOS to a nominally 32bit Windows 95 OS?
Mickey-mouse == poor quality, inconsistent
Outfit == organization, company.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Cost? Memory is cheap. Hard drive space is cheap.
Execution speed? Make your instruction cache bigger. Goes with the territory.
Download time? You'll find that RISC programs are more compressible than their CISC counterparts, so this shouldn't be much of a problem.
So, really, why is code size important? I'm sure there's something I'm missing here, but code size strikes me as something that was a lot more important "back in the day," when memory was more precious.
Beautiful!
Mod parent up!
So what if it's been 7 seconds since I last posted a comment?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Of course, Linus works for a chip maker
I knew it! All dotcomers end up working in Mcdonald.
look here:
pricewatch
almost $3000 for the chip. wow, and for so many mhz, too...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
that alpha and ia64 are the most advanced
architectures. Now tried to find a ref
to that with google, but could not. But
I swear, I saw it once. Maybe a year ago...
So what are we going all to do with 64 bit architecture anyway? Simulate galaxies... (or play D00m 3). Anyway I think the masses are all right with 32 bit for a while. Who needs 3 Mb of Cache? Think how much $$$ you would have to pay for that! check out: http://www.intel.com/eBusiness/products/itanium/ov erview/ar013901.htm
to see where the itanium might be used!
Actually that's a good question. I think chipmakers should slow down a bit and enjoy life. Perhaps meet halfway with a 48 bit chip...
Trolling is a art,
Code size matters. Price matters. Real world matters
If only on-chip instruction set morphing mattered...
(sorry, but it's true...he's living in a glass house on this one.)
Yo Yo Yo!!! Check it...
This one is goin out to Linus and all my kernal hackin homeboyz!!!
For an example, examine the sample
Not humble when I rumble, I crumble and trample
Not one part of my diction and sound found to be fiction
What I wrote is dope, so prepare for the addiction
Okay, capital K-double o-l G
Gimme a R, gimme a A, gimme a P
Lyrics, rhythm, and music, some try to chase it
So just let's face it, to G Rap this is basic
Training, I'm explainin, nothin too complicated
My language is English, it's not translated
Whether black or Spanish, I finish, diminish and vanish
I promise to you first, take advantage and damage
If you're in pain actin in mysery I'm sorry
But for the glory I play you out like Atari
The best in a jungle, swamp or safari
City or town, I cold rock a party
I battled in attics, centers and cellars
As many fellas I rock, you think they'd call me Rockefeller
I don't scream and yell, I just communicate well
Cause ideas dwell in every last braincell
I don't keep silent, I grab the mic and get violent
Skill and experience balanced with talent
I'm Cold Chillin', this ain't a hurry and a rushin
My style is mainly based on discussion and percussion
I haven't upgraded my workstation in 3 years and my next upgrade will be to a mac. Who cares about Intel anymore. When I buy rackmounts for development, I will continue to buy AMD.
...all they'd have to do is have a series of Linus editorials about how he hates Intel, Microsoft, *AA, Blizzard, and spam. It's easy money that lotsa ppl will show up to post their .. uh.. thoughtful comments and cycle the ads!
(it's a joke, smile.)
Check the latest SPEC CPU benchmarks. The Itanium2 has the fastest floating-point score and is no slouch in the integer tests either. It will improve. Linus will eat his words in a few years.
Would you really want to return to the dos himem.sys, memmaker, extended and expanded memory, and autoexec.bat hacks again? Sure they were not needed for the first several years of DOS when people had only 512 kb of ram but the situation changed quickly. Its this is what first turned me off from Microsoft. If I had 8 megs of ram and had 6 free why couldn't I run dune2? Do I not have a 32-bit chip? I had to create a custom boot disk with autoexec.bat just to run the game. That is screwed up.
A Hammer is nice just like a 386 was nice to have run 16-bit software. They were particularly usefull in Windows3.11 since it actually had 32-bit disk access while everything else was 16-bit. The hammer is fast at running 32-bit software and is easily upgradable if customers want to add ram. They do not understand techno mumble jumbo. Its not like you can explain the base of 2 math when Joe just wants to purchase a 4 gig ram stick and wonders why Windows wont recognize all the ram.
http://saveie6.com/
Heh...You really think Dubya and his goons would ever burn something that was made from pot plants? Now, if it was Peruvian blue-flake coke, watch out...
So where does that leave Transmeta? Hmmmmm?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
...about hardware. And Linus is a computer scientist. So why would I want trust his opinions about hardware architecture? Now if I wanted info on how to control some hardware with some software then Linus and crew are my choice. If I want to know about cpu architectures I'd ask the engineers who designed the x86 in the first place.
The read from theinquirer.net is all wrong. The slashdot story line is also wrong. It does not state at all what it implies. Here is the link to what Linus actually wrote:
3 02 .2/1909.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0
Now, I agree with Linus on the PPC MMU issue. Can anyone tell me what he means by "baroque instruction encoding"? I have been doing x86 and 68k assembler for a long time, I have never heard of this.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Linus isn't saying he won't let it in. He's simply saying that the thinks it's not a good arch based on technical merit. He'll let it in. He never said he wouldn't. He's just saying he doesn't like the way the chip was designed (what choices they made, etc).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The Eye of Argon: Chapter 1 by Jim Theis
The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives. Dust sprayed over three heaving mounts in blinding clouds, while they bore the burdonsome cargoes of their struggling overseers. "Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian", gasped the first soldier. "Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!" returned Grignr. A sweeping blade of flashing steel riveted from the massive barbarians hide enameled shield as his rippling right arm thrust forth, sending a steel shod blade to the hilt into the soldiers vital organs. The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid. The enthused barbarian swilveled about, his shock of fiery red hair tossing robustly in the humid air currents as he faced the attack of the defeated soldier's fellow in arms. "Damn you, barbarian" Shrieked the soldier as he observed his comrade in death. A gleaming scimitar smote a heavy blow against the renegade's spiked helmet, bringing a heavy cloud over the Ecordian's misting brain. Shaking off the effects of the pounding blow to his head, Grignr brought down his scarlet streaked edge against the soldier's crudely forged hauberk, clanging harmlessly to the left side of his opponent. The soldier's stead whinnied as he directed the horse back from the driving blade of the barbarian. Grignr leashed his mount forward as the hoarsely piercing battle cry of his wilderness bred race resounded from his grinding lungs. A twirling blade bounced harmlessly from the mighty thief's buckler as his rolling right arm cleft upward, sending a foot of blinding steel ripping through the Simarian's exposed gullet. A gasping gurgle from the soldier's writhing mouth as he tumbled to the golden sand at his feet, and wormed agonizingly in his death bed. Grignr's emerald green orbs glared lustfully at the wallowing soldier struggling before his chestnut swirled mount. His scowling voice reverberated over the dying form in a tone of mocking mirth. "You city bred dogs should learn not to antagonize your better." Reining his weary mount ahead, grignr resumed his journey to the Noregolian city of Gorzam, hoping to discover wine, women, and adventure to boil the wild blood coarsing through his savage veins. The trek to Gorzom was forced upon Grignr when the soldiers of Crin were leashed upon him by a faithless concubine he had wooed. His scandalous activities throughout the Simarian city had unleashed throngs of havoc and uproar among it's refined patricians, leading them to tack a heavy reward over his head. He had barely managed to escape through the back entrance of the inn he had been guzzling in, as a squad of soldiers tounced upon him. After spilling a spout of blood from the leader of the mercenaries as he dismembered one of the officer's arms, he retreated to his mount to make his way towards Gorzom, rumoured to contain hoards of plunder, and many young wenches for any man who has the backbone to wrest them away.
I think the problems with the Itanium boils down to this:
1. The CPU's are insanely expensive. They make the majority of x86-architecture Intel Xeon CPU's look like a bargain.
2. Where are the server applications that take advantage of the Itanium CPU? They're not exactly widely available, to say the least.
3. Programming for Itanium is still a somewhat iffy proposition.
Meanwhile, AMD's Athlon 64/Opteron offers these advantages:
1. The CPU will definitely NOT be insanely expensive to purchase.
2. Programming for the AMD x86-64 architecture is not going to require kiboshing a bunch of legacy programming tools and starting from scratch--it is a straightforward process to convert today's programming tools to take full advanratge of the x86-64 native mode.
3. Because the programming tools are so readily available, both operating systems and applications for the Athlon 64/Opteron will be available widely by the time the new AMD CPU's are finally released for sale. Already, UnitedLinux is porting Linux to run in x86-64 native mode, and Microsoft is very likely readying versions of Windows XP Home/Professional and Windows 2003 Server that will run in x86-64 native mode.
Meanwhile, Intel supposedly has a 64-bit x86-architecture CPU codenamed Yamhill that has developed. However, given we don't know how Yamhill implements 64-bit x86 instructions Intel will have to do some VERY serious convincing to Linux kernel programmers and to Microsoft to write Yamhill-native code--and Intel is far behind the AMD efforts.
Isn't much of CPU pricing relative from the Biggest/Baddest Chip? Didn't the advent of an IA-64 chip push down the price of all 32 bit chips? In this way it made it's competition more viable for that much longer (and hurt the few things that made it worthwhile to get).
What is music when you despise all sound?
Intel is a single entity, but alot of reporters on Slashdot affect the British-ism (do they support Tony Blair on Iraq, too?)
Someone has a chip on his shoulder.
If I had the mentality of a MotorTrend reporter, I would pose the issue in this way. If you were the general in charge of weapons procurement for the Department of Defense and you needed to select a high-end server to process radar information tracking enemy missiles targetted at the USA, then which server would you select? I would select a Power4 supercomputer as my first choice. Itanium would be second. Dead last would be the UltraSPARC.
Stupid nigger wannabe!
The latest tpc-c submissions are topped by a couple of clusters and a 128 processor machine from Fujitsu (456k tpmC @ $28.58/tpmC). Next is a 32 processor NEC Itanium2 system (433k tpmC @ $12.98/tpmc). Third place is a 32 processor IBM eServer pSeries 690 using Power4 processors (428k tpmc @ $17.75/tmpC). Anyway, I'd call that slightly better and a lot cheaper than the competition. Especially considering that Fujitsu has announced that in the future they will be using the Itanium processor family.
Incidentally, the NEC machine is running SQL Server 2000 on Windows Server 2003, whereas the other machines are running UNIXes. Take that however you like; you could claim that that is an unfair advantage, or a disadvantage for the Itanium machine. I take it to mean that Microsoft is improving their product significantly, but I'm not sure of the impact on performance.
It's too bad Linus is just full of (sh)it in this case. Badmouthing Alpha as a failure ("before they compromised their ideals") is weird; you'd think Linus knows better than that... Alpha is not only elegant architecture, it also performs really well. And as to x86 architecture, it just sucks and blows at same time. Implementations are fast, but design is as elegant as Ford SUVs are beautiful ("flies as well as bricks don't").
but when was the last time a one step upgrade gave any system a 2x performance.
Darn right. Even the upgrade from NES to GameCube doesn't push the frame rate of Super Mario above 60fps.
when i went from single channel ddr to dual channel ddr i did not see 2x performance
That's because you're playing "double" mode, which is designed for one person on both channels. You have to play "couple" mode with a friend in order to hit 2x the arrows with dual-channel Dance Dance Revolution.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I wonder if this is more of the "throw more tech at it and it doesnt matter how bad it is we'll ram thru by sheer will" method of hardware (and software) design?
Those spec scores are telling because the whole thing fits in the Itanic's level 2 cache.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
As was previously mentioned, this is from the linux-kernel mailing list. I would also like to add a humorous phrase that Linus used on that list. "Engineering-masturbation"
Ya gotta love the guy!
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
MIPS is behind Itanium in performance. HP-PA is behind Itanium in performance. SPARC3 is behind Itanium in performance. SPARC64V is behind Itanium in performance. Alpha has higher specint but lower specfp. Power has higher specint but lower specfp. Both major current IA32 processors have higher specint, but they are slaughtered on specfp.
That's without even mentioning TPC or Java benchmarks which make Itanium look just as good or better.
they were not needed for the first several years of DOS when people had only 512 kb of ram
Wha? I would have given my right arm for 512kb. Mine had 128k. Next step up had 256k. Geeze, 512k? We'd have been in happyland...
The fundamental reason is that the chip interconnections are on average longer for larger memories and that these connections behave like resistor-capacity systems. The longer the connection, the higher the RC constant, and the slower the component. The slowdown of longer lines can be overcome by increasing the voltage, but then power consumption (and accordingly heat dissipation) will increase dramatically, resulting in all kinds of problems. That's basically why storing data or code in smaller memories is good for speed and power consumption.
By the way, if smaller memories would not have important benefits, no chip producer would ever spend more than half of the chip area on up to three levels of caches. Of course small memories are useful only as long as the hot code of programs fit in them.
Hope this helps.
Didn't you hear? Intel is just a bunch of gnomes hiding inside bunny suits. Why Andy Grove is 30 gnomes alone!
--MBCook, being anon and trolling at the speed of light with bad jokes
I'd buy one just for the novelty value.
Perhaps this is just another "technical" and "synthetic" benchmark. It's all about real world performance, like Linus said, and there are many other shortfalls to the chip and its architecture.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Gcc obviously will perform alot worse then Intel's own compiler and its the only one Linux can compile with.
make that a lot (forgivable, though), than, and it's or it's
Sun has an interesting( biased) peace [sunmicrosystems.com]on Itanium. If I were buying a server I would avoid Itanium like the plauge.
that would be piece and was.
You did go to highschool, right? I mean, confusing "then" and "than," as well "was" and "were" is simply not excusable if you want anybody to take what you say seriously.
The SPEC benchmarks are real-world. That's the point of them, and they've been used over the last 10 years to judge the real performance of a processor.
I think Itanium/Itanium2 are radical departures in x86 design, and they do not come without risks.
These risks are calculated, and I think it is a bit much for Linux to say iNTEL engineers learned nothing from the past.
Much of the Itanium design, is reliant on processes that haven't even been perfected yet....(0.9 Micron etc silicone).
As process technology catches up with Itanium, and the bugs get worked out over the next 2-3 years, I think you will see Itanium in the server room and also on high end desktops.
Not only that but they will out perform anything the market at the time they are introduced.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I'd be much more interested in readying why Linus thought Transmetta was such a flop.
AMD is the wildcard. If x86-64 is the bomb and takes off like AMD is betting on it. Intel lost the 64bit war for many years. IBM and maybe even Sun will quietly (well sun doesn't do jack shit quietly) push x86-64 for the low end while IBM POWER4 and POWER5 and POWER6 down the road run the big end.
Basically Intel needs something like Sun to jump on it IA64 to really give it some credibility and they don't sound real eager to. IBM sounds like they are down for the fight. Alpha, MIPS, PARISC are all pretty dead; long term and relatively speaking. Meanwhile, if Intel doesn't get on the shit quick then they'll have to support x86-64 too and that's the real death blow to IA64.
Sounds just like the Linus of Charlie Brown holding tight to that security blanket.
Kids will be kids, but unless they are cartoons, they eventually grow up.
But, alas, I tend to agree with him. I just don't get RISC chips. Why they want to remove things that make programming easier is beyond me.
+2 cents contributed.
SPEC scores tell me almost nothing useful. The code to run SPEC benchmarks is emitted by tricked-out compilers whose whole purpose is to emit hand-crafted assembly code specifically tuned to run those SPEC benchmarks. It doesn't tell me anything about how well common programs and subsystems perform at common tasks. You might as well buy a family car based on the quarter-mile time at the racetrack for a like-model car with a supercharger and dangerously-tweaked ignition timing, burning 120 octane racing fuel.
In five years, if the Itanium isn't a huge success, will you eat your words?
Back when it was released, it was roundly maligned for offering shitty performance for Win95 users. "Buy a Pentium 233MMX" all the magazines screamed.
Well, the PPro turned out to be one of the best chips of its day, and the 200Mhz version performed within 5% of the Pentium II 300mhzs that were released 18 months later. I still have dual-PPro system running my CVS/MP3/print/etc. server.
Linus may be a god in the linux software universe, but I wouldn't discount Intel on this just yet.
At a recent QA, Linus was asked a question as to what he thought on IA64. He went on to tell a story about developers of the processor asking him if he could see a use for some of it's features. He replied with "errr, no!".
...The shipping is free.
Intel (or AMD) should buy transmeta.
i hope something like that is in the works.
intel should turn transmeta into their server line of CPU's, and specifically design them around linux.
come one guys, if you play together, great yields ye shall receive.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
That doesn't mean it's the best solution. Merely the one that's going to win. Architecturally speaking, x86 is one of the biggest loads of crap to come along since...well...hmmm...I can't think of anything crappier off the top of my head.
Extreme register pressure. Segmentation models that make you want to retch. Hacks (PAE, anyone?) that leave any sane designer gibbering incoherently.
If you read the thead, Linus' main argument seems to be "to get good performance, all the other architectures have had to do complex things in hardware, so there's no real hardware simplification in going with a 'better' architectural design. Plus variable length opcodes are a natural cache optimization!"
I respect Linus a great deal, but he's talking out of his ass here. I agree that IA-64 may be best relegated to some academic's wet dream, but just about any of the major RISC architectures are big wins over x86. Intel and AMD have worked miracles with x86 to get it to run fast, but at a staggering engineering cost. The teams working on RISC chips tend to be a fraction of the size to come out with a high-performance chip. If the RISC houses had an engineering team of comperable size (and access to the same bleeding edge lithography processes) it would easily be worth an extra 25% in performance, minimum.
If you look in the embedded world, just about anything that requires serious embedded performance is RISC based (MIPS/ARM, mostly), simply because it decreases the engineering work involved by an order of magnitude. Plus, writing low level software for just about any RISC chip is loads easier than for x86.
Unfortunately, x86 is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Intel killed Alpha, not by buying it, but by doing a great job of pushing cheap x86 performance to the same level as Alpha, often surpassing it in later years. The same thing is happening to the other workstation-class RISC vendors, and, honestly, to Itanium, too. I don't see any reason to believe the march to x86 hemogeny outside the embedded world is likely to slow anytime soon.
ia64 is in the mainline kernel. At least Debian and Red Hat have released, stable distributions for it. Red Hat even sells support for it.
ia64 is "in there" as much as alpha and sparc, even if it isn't quite as well tested.
Complete bullshit. I know people who work in the Intel compiler group. They go to extensive lenghts to make sure that the optimizations used on the spec programs are general-purpose. In fact, they have to be in order to count as a qualifying SPEC run. You can't get away with a gcc --SPEC flag, asshole.
"Linus will eat his words in a few years."
I guess those would be the words where he says it will take Itanium a few years to catch up with x86?
Not only did I have an XT with 512 kb but back in only 85 or 86 my father brought home a 286 IBM AT with a whopping 2,000 kb aka 2 megs of ram, 40 meg hard drive and a full color monitor! The word meg was not used commonly at the time so I called it 2000 kb. All my friends had appleII's and commodores with 128k of ram and I had 2 fucking megs! hehe
Then I learned about the limitations of 16-bit operating systems and memory access. 2 megs were a waste on the system. The expanded memory hack worked but most programs later on only worked with extended memory which the 286 could not do. Then he bought a 486 but unless os/2 was loaded on it I had to deal with the same limitations. He was pissed that I loaded a pirated version of os/2 and wanted windows 3.11 back on. Bawawawa. Glad I am an adult now.
http://saveie6.com/
Idiot... I suppose the Itanium 2 has a 256MB L2 cache? You must be confusing it with the Power 4: 4 CPUs/MCM, 3 of them disabled to free up cache for the Specrun.
Hmmm, not being a "true" geek (would not even consider... Don't know any programming languages), I notice sales of video game consoles aren't particularly sluggish (allbeit a slow running 128 bit). Sony promises a 256bit machine in a few years, and I imagine it will sell very well too (as well as any of the other competitors).
On top of being a top flight gaming machine (which is the lionshare of the consumer computer market), it will probably be able to do all of the things people use their desktops for now. And it will probably do it at about half the price. In which case, why do I even need a desktop (except damnit, I can't run Wavelab. Certainly an OS clone will follow)?
I think couching the argument in terms of Intel vs. AMD, etc. is shortsighted. I have heard the arguments of "you don't need more power", and historically, they has been proven wrong (the first killer app will sell the hardware).
Intel, please get your affairs in order. The last gasp of a dying breed.
My first computer was a PC Junior. 128k of RAM, and I'm not sure how fast it went but it would have been 4.77 mhz at the fastest (and probably a little less). I loved that little machine.
Then I learned about the limitations of 16-bit operating systems and memory access. 2 megs were a waste on the system.
It sounded good at least...
The second highest rated TPC box in the world is running Itaniums...
t s. asp?resulttype=noncluster
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_resul
The plural version is actually correct for any version of English besides the US English.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Linux made him ... oh wait nevermind.
Transmetta makes a lot of ... oops there I go again.
Intel is a company that time and time again proves it knows how to make money. It may not always support the crowds it should (like /. readers and superusers) but they are still making money.
Sure there are lots of difficulties going to a new ISA. Especially at the server level. And yes Itanium has had some performance problems, especially in its first revision, but then again when was the last time you saw a company produce a 1st generation microprocessor and have it do well?
IA64 offers tons of advanced ILP concepts and OS concepts that, when correctly implemented, can increase performance drastically. (if your looking for examples, data speculation, control speculation, predication, registers with kernel access only, rotating register files, a much larger register set, etc).
The problem may be, it puts a lot of complexity into the Compilers, and compiler technology isn't good enough for Itanium yet.
But then again, what do I know, Linus has made more money than I have. I just like arguing the other side while everyone else screams about how the Itanium will die.
Next he'll be telling us the x86 instruction set is elegant! Ha ha ha ha! Risc has more advantages than just being closer to the 'hardware' it's also generally a more elegant instruction set. The x86 instruction set has barely any consistency (other than being crap). It is NOT elegant. It does not allow compilers to do much code optimization to utilize registers better (since it barely has any). For a good instruction set, check out the ARM. We have, unfortunately, been stuck with this dog of an instruction set due to intel. It's hideous. Next he'll be telling us that the ISA bus is the best thing since sliced cheese (or is it fondue), and that we never had any need for PCI etc etc etc.
Let me repeat this one more time:
NO GAMING CONSOLE IS 128-bit (nor will they be 256-bit)
The PS2 is a 32-bit system. It has a 32-bit wide address space and word space. It happens to have a quad-word SIMD execution unit. By this logic, the MMX-enabled pentium is also 128-bit.
Okay... got that out of my system.
What the 64-bit address space WILL do is make OS design simpler. This is an important win for developers. I understand OS start-up times will be vastly improved because applications, libraries, etc. will all be able to load at static addresses in memory, all precomputed. It'll also make database-as-filesystems easier to implement.
Forget gaming machines, this is BIG stuff, a big step, and Intel is foolish to ignore it.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
That isn't as silly as it sounds. AMD was doing exactly that: working on a chip which would support x86 8, 16 & 32bit CISC code, as well as supporting its own high-performance 48bit RISC instruction set. They gave up on the project, instead going the hole hog with 64bits when they realised their 64bit CPU project was an attainable target for them.
I would have moded you up for that if you hadn't gone Anonymous! Nice info I didn't know...
Score:5+, Interesting and Insightful
Does Intel significantly mark up the price of Itanium? Pricewatch lists Itanium as selling for ~$2800. Are the production prices anywhere near that high?
What I'm wondering is if, when the Hammer falls, the price of Itanium will plummet that afternoon.
I may be clueless, but what was the major problem with the ALPHA chip as a 64-bit processor and why isn't a good starting point for the next generation of chips? I realize it will not run x86 binaries, but won't it be necessary to do a lot of recoding anyway to move to 64-bits?
Intel is a single entity, not a Star-Trek race.
Are you sure?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Maybe that's only cause of the massive cache and the HUGE number of transistors.
too bad other companies dont have their manufactureimng process up to par on price and performance with intel.
I know it's not very nerd-like to say that Linus is wrong and that AMD sucks, but in the case of the Itanium, that is exactly how I feel. Intel/HP's Itanium architecture is perhaps the most advanced processor to hit the market and has tremendous potential (from a Computer Architecture point of view). Because it's so new, its performance will be aweful, but shall improve with time. Anyone remember the SuperSparc? It performed horribly and was soon replaced by the UltraSparc. As will the Itanium II replace the Itanium.
As for the emulation/legacy code argument, I say screw it. gcc is already ported to IA-64. And as a Linux user, most of my favorite open source programs can be ported with little difficulty.
First of all it is not very smart to try to reduce code size by putting complicated instructions in the processor architecture.
A succesfull architecture may be used for 20 years, and there is no way you can know which complex instructions will be most usefull/popular in several years. And when you start making upgraded chips for a design, these complex instructions will be a real pain in the ass.
The x86 architecture is a perfect example - it is a mess and many of its instructions are not used at all. The x86 is succesful because the way history played out - it was put on the first pcs, and the incredible numbers of precessors sold allowed intel to put more development money into that architecture than any body else was able to put into theirs. And large initial investments, and large sales numbers mean that individual chip prices can be lower.
Nevertheless, the alpha and some of sun's chips can still compete with intel in the server environment, with much smaller investments and worse production technology. That basicly shows the weakness of the x86 architecture.
When you have multiple pipelines and multiple stages per pipeline the size of your chip will grow exponentially to the number and complexity of your instuctions. Eventually adding more pipelines will be pointless and then you are reduced to adding cache as the only way you can improve your architecture.
For a Risc architecture, multiple pipelines will cost less overhead and more can be used. Processor performance can be increased by adding more pipelines without having to increase speed.
Intel has the money and the clout to make a succesful risc architecture. It is brave of them to do it, but from an engineering point of view it is the only right thing to do.
AMD will support x86 because they do not have the clout to force a new architecture on the world. It is a completely understandable policy, but then again will result in worse performance (unless their engineers are somehow much more brilliant than intel's).
Of course the real world matters and in the real world almost everyone uses x86. But if someone can change that it is intel.
"Rocks are out? Hammers are in? Let's make a Hammer!" and they went and built a hammer-shaped rock. duh.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
It seems to me that the AMD way is the smarter way. If you wanted to start porting apps to 64 bit architectures you would want as smooth a transition as possible.
Please keep in mind I know nothing about CPU design so I could quite possibly be talking out my arse here.
Torvalds is no longer to be trusted. His position as a profitmaking employee of a money-losing corporation nullifies his credibility.
Sarcasm is invincible.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
....... to AMD to use its SE2 instruction set??/
:P:P
IIRC they did, so Intel has everything thing to gain from AMD jumping in head first.
im sure intel (and AMD in 3years) could whip out a 10ghz cpu, at a cheep cost. but it wouldnt be economical (ie miss out 3 generations of CPU revenue)intel have many years of R&D under there belt... AMD are so young they are still using suspenders..........
d_h
oh yea, my reasoning is that the AMD 64bit, has twice the bits of a 32bit cpu, so it will produce 4x the heat
but this is like reading the comments after John Carmack has posted some remarks on graphics chips. There's always a rush of people to claim "I know its not trendy, but he's full of shit". Ah, the rebel without a cause . . . the problem being, of course, that there are some people who actually have accomplished significant achievements. These people, such as Linus or Carmack, will always get a listen from those of us who are less technically inclined because they have proven that they have at least SOME idea of what they are talking about, whereas the critics are nobodies.
After all, if you're so smart, how come you haven't done anything anyone else would notice? Or, put another way, the world is full of people who Know Better. These people will tell you, until they are blue in the face, that they Know Better. We can take their word that they Know Better, because they told us this themselves. But if you can't demonstrate that you Know Better where the rubber meets the road, then, well, you really don't have much to say, do you?
Does Linus know eveything there is to know about cpu architecture? Nope. He doesn't even know everything there is to know about Linux. But he does know a lot more than the average bear, and unlike the peanut gallery lurking on internet message boards, he has demonstrated that he knows a lot. If Linus doesn't like the itanium, that's a kick in the teeth to intel regardless of whether your imaginary compiler works a lot better on the itanium than on x86.
the fact that linus works for a chip maker doesnt really matter because he dosn't develop the chips. he gets paid there to develop the linux kernel.
"he gets paid" is the key point. If the chips don't sell he doesn't get paid.
Linus, don't worry the 86x architecture will stick around for years for the mainstream users because intel wants that Itanium to be sold to rich corporate customer's servers.
None of us are going to be using it so listening to all these people bitch about it makes no sense.
The itanium sounds nice - parallel processing,reg renaming, big cache , and good fl.point.
The only problem may be the heat generated and maybe the inablity to put the pedal on the CLOCK FREQ.
The fact that the benchmark is tuned to run the benchmark is tautological. Of course it is. That's no argument. As compared with prior attempts to optimize hardware for a specific software usage, this is the best ever.
Man I am so smart I think I'll grab another beer and gloat about it.
Clickety Click
Present Itanium offerings are not competing in the same market as Opteron. Opteron is positioned in the Xeon domain. Deerfield - the low-wattage, low-cost version of the Madison Itanium2 core - will be the bellwether for IA64's market penetration outside of very customized supercomputing jobs. It is on Intel's roadmap for Q3. If Intel's conception of "low-cost" coincides with real peoples' idea of low cost, IA64 could within a few years take a signifigant share of the Xeon market segment, where it can sit comfortably until software vendor acceptance grows to the point that IA64 can become a mainstream desktop option. People focus on Intel saying "no 64 bit desktop until 2007" while forgetting that they are intending IA64 not x86-64 on the desktop later in the decade.
For great justice.
Ya, but he works for trasmeta. If he were trying to pimp the company he works for he'd be pushing some Transmeta chip not AMD's stuff. Then again I could be wrong and there could be some connection between AMD and Trasmeta or some "The enemy of my enemy is my ally" type of deal.
Without Windows for x86-64, AMD is dead. No, Linux will not save it. However, the moment Microsoft releases Windows for x86-64, Itanic is history. The market will overwhelmingly favour x86-64 because of the much lower price (I expect at least 3-4 times lower, cosidering that the Itanic CPU alone sells for over $3000), and perfect backwards compatibility. Itanic's ia32 support is so pathetically slow that it may as well not exist, so a move to Itanic requires you to replace _all_ your software, which ain't cheap, while x86-64 allows you to do incremental upgrades. So, taking simple economics into account, Itanic will go the way of that ship and AMD will emerge the winner... provided there is a version of Windows for x86-64. Without that there is no point of talking about "64 bit desktop" market because it just won't exist. So what is Microsoft doing?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
You might want to look into a Radeon 9700 Pro. Your old card is probably a major bottleneck for gaming. New Total System Cost: $900.
the inq likely read an aceshardware forum post on sunday containing a set of quotes from the archive. http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=95019636
Sometimes, just becomes someone HAS an economic interest in something, and IS interested in seeing something fail/succeed, does not automatically invalidate the point he/she makes. Linus didn't just put forth an unsubstantiated rumor or point of view; he backed his points up with facts and reasoning. If he is biased, show facts and reasoning to counter the bias, or else you are no better than the FUD-mongers when you write him off.
With Itanium will my volume slider on XP box, opens in less than 5 sec ?
If you get, for example, a 64 bit AMD processor, do you need to run softare compiled for that processor?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Torvalds wrote that Intel had made the same mistakes "that everybody else did 15 years ago"
when RISC architecture was first appearing.
RISC first showed up on the commercial radar screen almost twenty years when MIPS Computer Systems
was formed. But people at Stanford (and Berkeley, IIRC) had been publishing papers about
RISC for four or five years before that, and people at IBM were working on it even before that.
And the CDC 6600 was a RISC machine in the 1960s. If you don't believe me, ask Cray's Chief Scientist Burton Smith.
In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way. -- Alan Perlis
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
Some guy from Transmeta badmouths Intel's new processor and Slashdot files this under AMD?
I know that AMD has something to gain here but shouldn't this be under a different topic? Maybe when it gets reposted it'll be correct.
64bit is very important in my opinion, both on the server and on the desktop, but not at any cost. And the cost with Itanium is simply too high.
Who is Itanium good for? Who is G4 or Power4 good for? What is X86 good for?
That's like asking what is a saw, hammer and screwdriver good for...they each have an application.
All these architectures have their good points and bad points. I've written sparc and x86 assembler and I can't say that they are better or worse than each other....just different.
At this point the hardware is MOOT. Unless algorithms get significantly better soon, the hardware won't matter. Sure, we'll get mega memory address space with any 64-bit architecture, but what does that get you? More memory address space? Big deal...so you've got big memory space...that won't make NP=P any time soon.
-ted
It is still a full port, if you want to get the benefits of the 64-bit architecture. If you want to keep running 32-bit x86 code, don't even bother recompiling. But don't make the mistake of thinking that switching 32-bit x86 code over to x86-64 is a simple re-compile.
//(forgive me if I have the parameters backwards, I'm doing this from memory. And notice that I'm a bad programmer, I didn't check the return value.)
It is still a port, with all that is included in that awful word.
Do you understand how little 64-bit safe code there is that runs on 32-bit x86 systems? Most of the linux kernal is already 64-bit safe, because it has been ported to so many other 64-bit architectures already. And it still wasn't a simple "just recompile it".
Speaking specifically to C programs here, porting from 32-bit to 64-bit is not a fun process. A variable declared as "int" switches in allocation size. This is good and bad.
fread (fp, sizeof(int), &var);
Congratulations, you just killed all your existing data files. And if you happened to read a 32-bit pointer from that data file (any structures that you write directly that contain a pointer write a pointer... you'll throw the pointer value away when you read the structure back in, but you still have to read the proper data size), and then assign a pointer to it... Oh, you're going to have all sorts of fun playing with that.
Yes, this may only be an issue with "bad" C code that assumes it will ever only run on a 32-bit platform... That probably covers 99% of all x86 C code out there, for any OS you care to name.
Don't pretend it will be easy moving from 32-bit x86 to x86-64. For most programs, I assure you, it will be non-trivial. Anything that does direct memory allocation will have to be checked very carefully. Anything that does binary file i/o will have to be checked very carefully. Oh, and anything that uses "magic" numbers will have to be checked... Have you ever used an if conditional for an int of the form
if (i == 0xFFFFFFFF)
congrats, you just assumed 32-bit for your architecture.
64-bit clean code is the exception, not the rule.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Mod this down for crying out loud. What does this have to do with the article?
Nah. Using an nForce2 chipset I'll go with an nVidia option. I happen to have a GeForce4MX-440 DDR AGP 8X card here that will probably work for now. I always buy older graphics cards because I don't use Windows. Therefore I wait a year, the price drops, and the Linux drivers materialize.
Heck, I was cutting edge Linux OpenGL way back when... I compiled Mesa 2.6 for my Voodoo2 and was rocking with Quake2 years and years ago. Ah those days of yore...
Clickety Click
So what is Microsoft doing?
I don't know about "x86-64" but Windows XP is currently available as a beta release for Itanium 2, according to
this HP site.
So what is Microsoft doing?
According to this table nothing..? Unless MS refers to x86-64 as Itanium technology.
Sorry while I rant, but you just stomped on one of my nerves. (Unless your comment about neededing that much RAM was a complaint about Adobe or their direct *cough* compeitors -- sucks to be you.)
<Old Geezer Mode> In one case, not long ago, a fellow lab-rat Eric Mortenson had sold his research and tools to Adobe, but part of the poorly-written agreement said that he couldn't upgrade his work station. So he finished his Ph.D on a 386 with 32-MB of RAM, while the rest of us in the lab were using Pentium 3's, DEC Alpha's, and various SGI boxs. Eric's algorithms ran great on the newer PC's even though he couldn't develop them on the new boxes. Other with Adobe (NOT on that web site interestingly enough) needed the DEC Alphas (64-bit machines) with scads of memory and much more running time to do a similar implementation of Eric's algorithms. </Old Geezer Mode>
3D rendering doesn't take that much RAM. As a 3D graphics researcher and developer, I have worked with models where individual objects were multi-gigabytes (meshes+textures and volumes) but even then, having 1GB of RAM was more than enough for us to reach 20-30 FPS realtime on a box with NT4 and first- and second-generation 3D cards. Software rendering with very realistic detail was a little slower (3-5 fps) but was fine for writing movies. Progressive geometry & texture transmission, continuously calculated view-dependant detail levels, and other current and not-so-current research would solve the memory problems in 3D. Don't believe me? Go to Visualization 2003 and see if the leading researchers are finding RAM as their primary bottleneck. It is a bottleneck of course, but processing speed, caches, and the system BUS limitations are far more troubling.
As for video editing, you only need enough memory for the tools, a few frames, and whatever operations you are performing. In every case that I've had to do video editing, I've seen two classes of tools -- those that take gobs of memory and try to copy the entire video clip into RAM and end up thrashing for memory -- and those that intellegently figure out what is needed and use only the memory needed for the app.
An example of the first, an Adobe AfterEffects rendering a simple math function over time was only able to render 30-seconds because it wanted to buffer the AVI file in memory and ran out of RAM (2GB) after a several-hour rendering. An example of the second, a simple home-brew compositor that used the Windows multimedia API to write the AVI to disk -- the same machine and the same set of images required about 45 minutes to render the entire clip.
So instead of saying:
I would suggest you say " I need to buy tools that are properly designed and implemented for my class of computer. "
Frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
It would be very risky for Microsoft not to provide a version if windows for x86-64. Microsoft are already facing major competition in their server market from free *nix. If they allowed the competition access to free reign on a very fast and powerful architecture, they would be taking a major risk.
Microsoft need to weigh up development costs against the risk the *nix/x86-64 will become very popular and decide whether its worth their while to compete with a version of Windows. I would guess it is.
> Probably not, but a lot more desktops get sold
> than high-end servers. If AMD manages to get
> a toe-hold on the desktop with their 64-bit
> solution, the chances are a lot better x86-64
> will migrate up the food chain than ia64 will
> migrate down.
After all, isn't this also one reason why we are looking at x86 everywhere instead of a world filled with Sparc/Alpha/PPC? Intel could offer x86-64, but how much smller would their Itanium market be? Quite a dilemma, they would need to hurt Itanium sales to keep the desktop.
Are they selling the bread to keep the silver on the table? (not my quote)
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Already been done. Check out the Harris H-series computers, which have a 24 bit single precision int and a 48 bit long int.
It's a fine, fine system, in which single and double precision floats take up 48 bits, but have different precision.
You'll be especially happy to learn that the OS was called VOS for "Vulcan Operating System." The peripheral model was that "everything is a tape drive" which means that you can rewind your files.
That would be the Playstation 2.
Throw in the playstation 1 and we might be up to 100 million.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Take my grandfather for example. He worked as a transportation lawyer, back in the bad old Interstate Commerce Commision days. The ICC was created to regulate railroad monopolies, but was eventually coopted by the railroads to keep out trucking competition. In order to establish a new shipping route, you needed to prove to the ICC that there was a "need" for this new shipping route. Clearly, it was an absurd, anti-competitive system. My grandfather retired shortly before the industry was deregulated. However, to this day, he still believes that the ICC was a good thing, because being dependant on its existance for a job made him a believer.
The point is, when you have an economic interest in something, it can start to affect how you think about things. The wealthy tend to want tax cuts, and the poor tend to want spending increases, but most of them are probably not conciously supporting those positions for their own selfish ends. They truly believe that what's good for them is the right thing for everyone, it's a natural justification process for humans, and I wouldn't think less of Linus for the tricks his subconcious might play on his mind
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Extravagant, complex, or bizarre, especially in ornamentation
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The stats you quote are meaningless without the resolution and color depth given. 20-30 FPS at 320x320x16 is a totally different animal from 20-30 FPS at 2048x1024x256, for example, and the difference is precisely in memory usage.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It's like the damn Space shuttle. The only reason it is that complicated is because it wasn't all that well thought up in the beginning. Intel has historically been known as the first with the worst.
Now if only Motorola could save us now...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The key point about Itanium is that it is a horrible general purpose processor but it is a serious contender to be very good processor for supercomputing. It has very good floating point performance and the EPIC architecture is designed to be very good on Fortran, especially vectorizable Fortran which is very prevelent in HPC applications. What Linus said is correct in the context of Itanium as a general purpose processor, but its doesn't give Itanium the credit its due as a floating point supercomputer which is the only place its going to sell and is what it was designed for.
It will probably never be very good for most C and C++ apps. Pointer aliasing in particular will give the Itanium compiler fits. Unless you manually tell the compiler there are no two pointers accessing the same memory the compiler can't safely or effectively pack the parallel instructions in the VLIW and that is the essential to good performance in VLIW.
You do have to really question the sanity of some execs at Intel and HP for spending the staggering sums they've spent on Itanium. Supercomputing just isn't big enough a market for them to have any chance to recoup their investment in our lifetime and they aren't going to sell it in to the mass market as Linus said.
For a general purpose 64 bit processor to run existing C and C++ applications AMD is going to win hands down. But as many have noted its not likely most people are going to really need a 64 bit processor anytime soon so Intel will probably do just fine selling 32 bit x86 processors for a while.
@de_machina
According to the MegaHertz performance (HINT) rating, I can buy a 1,100! MHz AMD Duron CPU for $29! And this Duron is Amd64 and Alpha EV6 compliant! Duron has always been 64bit, baby! WAHOO!
One of the more interesting things in psychology is the attitude people have towards their beliefs. What they think they do is:
a) evaluate a situation
b) come to a conclusion
c) act on that conclusion
In reality what they tend to do is:
a) evaluate a situation
b) act on that evaluation
c) derive a conclusion from the action
With the Power5 coming from IBM ... and if, only if, Linus took that job offer by Jobs. Not his gig, that's cool.
... the Power5 will be running my next Mac (G4 being my first :) and I can't wait to sink my Linux teeth into it too. I'm also very interested in what BSD will do on it...
We came this close }.{ to having Mac OS X being Linux based... We'd all be singing, "It's a Mac world after all.."
Either way
Windows? Nah. I'll let Mickey try it. He'll use anything. I wonder if IBM will let Windows even run on it? Oh the games they could play... Lotus, Quicken , shall I go on?
Using the 64 bit question as leverage against intel by hinting it favors one architecture or the other from time to time.
And what if MS pulls a dos 6.0 and sits on the 64 bit question for years, insisting everyone fork out for the new millenium's dos4gw. Do you think people would stand for it? Screw segmentation, even if the kernel does it transparently. I'd rather walk my grandmother through a netbsd install on an sgi crimson via postcard than code with segmentation in mind again. It's not freaking nineteen nintyone anymore.
One application where 64-Bit addressable would be welcomed in open arms is server application. If you can directly map gigabyte drive arrays you skip some of the hit on the OS level of doing something else to calculate offset. While it maybe dubious to make desktop applications 64-bit addressable things like databases and drive drivers would benifit from the full support.
Hey! I know you! You're the guy who wrote WindowsXP, aren't ya..
just like the humble blood clot... turboporsche@telus.net
I don't follow your logic here. I don't see how implementing complex routines that the microcode is going to have to turn into lots of instructions in the CPU is any better than the current system. Also with these gigantic libraries I'd assume the chip yield would be tiny.
I don't see how this makes sense from a price / value perspective. What's the advantage?
64bit CPUs are a reality. An even greater reality is *) larger L1 and L2 CPU icache and dcache. The first performance-exhilerating CPU is unarguably the Intel Pentium Pro. Many people criticize it because Intel continued through its later designs with some incorporation of the Pentium Pro design, yet it was initially a good design. The Pentium Pro was successful by the use of its 512K of L2 cache which operated at the same core CPU Frequency of 200MHz. This proves one fact, it was expensive; the ellusive 1MB Cache Pentium Pro CPUs were expensive to fabricate, although they performed excellently compared with various Pentium 2/3 and AMD K6-2 CPUs of much higher performance rating. Mind you, the Pentium Pro was successful without addition of any specialized instruction sets other than i386 and Classic_Pentium+ compatibility. The first 64bit CPU to realistically replace the Pentium Pro was the DEC Alpha; and of which is the only CPU with a clean-through 64bit design and clean instruction set. The DEC Alpha was bought-out by Compaq, later to be bought-out by HP. Compaq continued the engineering of the Alpha, yet failed to bring down its cost. HP is attempting to discontinue the Alpha, yet the Alpha performs greater than its would-be 64bit replacment; Itanium2. 64bit CPUs require more integrated cache and system RAM because of how data is stored and retrieved. Quite honestly, 32bit CPUs are more efficient with RAM usage, but 64bit CPUs offer more precision, capacity, and were always criticized as being slower-by-theoretical-hypothesis, yet the Alpha architecture always attracted people by its over-achievment and superiority to the X86 architectures. The future is 64bit and for such a transition will require developers to be 64bit-aware, in order to improve their applications to be more efficient on the 64bit-clean architectures. AMD is currently releasing a hybrid 32bit/64bit CPU and will have the transition postponed even further, yet is needed to progress technologically. For 64bit CPUs to compete, they need to offer MORE. Itanium2 will sink, because it is too expensive. AMD's hybrid CPU, released this year as Opteron, will be the only successor in the market. Of greater note, 64bit CPUs are already eclipsed by an even-better designed CPU that is both low-power and fast...Transmeta's Crusoe:128bit with a re-programmable 32bit x86 code "layer". Transmeta's Crusoe platform allows it to mimick any instruction set, or in general sense re-program its instruction set so any software can be run in a fassion closer to receiving native performance. The highest performing Processor and architecture of all-time is the Alpha. Nothing has out-performed the Alpha and everyone wants it discontinued simply because "other" investments "demand" returns to their designers. Alpha is unlike Intel and AMD because its owners still ignore the importance of affordability. Only AMD's hybrid 32bit/64bit CPUs will push the market now...
Intel killed Alpha
I agree with most of your post but this line deserves comment. Dec hurt Alpha and Compaq killed it. It was Dec not Intel that couldn't decide if they were supporting NT x86 boxes or low end Alphas. It was Dec not Intel that wouldn't bring the cost of the GEM down. It was Dec not Intel that didn't address the memory cost issue.
It was Compaq not Intel that told the Alpha customers that Alpha had no future. Intel did the opposite and violated a ton of patents because they thought there were great ideas in Alpha architecture.
Intel and Microsoft often get the blame / credit for their competitors dropping the ball. Dec/Compaq killed Alpha and IBM killed OS/2.
Don't forget this was an accident. Originally IBM had pushed for Microchannel would have solved the bus problem. The clones killed IBM and it took years for the PCs to get reasonable bus standards (essentially Intel took IBM's role over).
Microsoft can provide a Server OS for Itanium and x86-64. They can balk on providing a desktop OS for either architecture.
Doing so, they can let the market shake out which processor, or both, is best. However, most people seem to agree (I am NO expert to have an opinon on the matter) that Itanium will be better than x86-64 as a server CPU. Why drag along the legacy x86 stuff for Server platforms where compatability with Fred's ancient shareware crap isn't needed? 'Legacy support' is largely a Desktop issue for Microsoft. Cuz they don't have a hell of a lot of a server legacy.
Heck, I was cutting edge Linux OpenGL way back when... I compiled Mesa 2.6 for my Voodoo2 and was rocking with Quake2 years and years ago. Ah those days of yore...
You slandaring bastard! Voodoo2 SLI on my Alpha is still faster than your GeForce4MX440 DDR AGP 8x swazzymodo-poo-poo!
There are two issues here:
1. There is no difference in the speed it takes to transfer data, because the bus is wider. There is also no difference in the time it takes to process data, because registers are also wider. There is a decrease in cache performance (because addresses take up more space). All other things (CPU design, clock speed, etc.) being equal, this hit would be of about 5%. It would only apply to programs running in 64-bit mode, though (the Hammer can still run in 32-bit mode, and can use 8, 16 and 32-bit pointers even in 64-bit mode, in certain instructions).
2. AMD's x86-64 Hammer doesn't just increase the register size to 64 bits. It adds several new registers, that can (with minor adjustments in the compilers) give a pretty good speed improvement (I'd say about 10% for the same clock speed, although this will depend a lot on the specific program). It also improves the prefetch and adds SSE2 support (one of the few areas where the P4 has an edge). This should give the Hammer approximately a 20-25% improvement over an Athlon XP at the same clock speed (more, if SSE2 is used).
RMN
~~~
The problem is... if you give a Xeon 3MB of cache and a 64-bit memory controller, it'll sink the Itanic without breaking a sweat.
Which is why Intel can't release a 64-bit desktop chip to compete with AMD and IBM: they'd kill their own Itanium sales. IMO, they are going to regret this; they are giving AMD and IBM a very big opportunity. If Intel released a 64-bit Xeon, they would lose some money, but AMD and IBM would lose a lot more. As Microsoft knows very well, in the long run, keeping your competition under control is more important than maximising your profits.
RMN
~~~
"Complete bullshit" == "+3: Informative" on Slashdot. People that buy Itaniums and the like frequently care about SPEC* because cpu intensive applications frequently behave like some combination of those numbers. If all you care about the Desktop you can keep your Quake3 and Photoshop benchmarks. (Not aimed at you, more to granparent).
XML causes global warming.
Is it most people's impression that the IA64 is Intel's first attempt at a pure RISC design?
That's what I think I see in most arguments against the IA64. I've never worked with them but I seem to recall the i860 and i960 processors being pure RISC. Can anyone who has worked with them(Microway had PC add-on cards that used them) say whether they were poorly designed?
That's the real key. Now days, recompiling well written software for different CPU's is trivial, provided the OS API is the same. If Windows runs on an Itanium well, I can likely just recompile my software and be done. If it can emulate 80x86 well enough to let me run old Windows programs, that's game-set-match.
/. doesn't like the view of the world through Microsoft colored glasses, but that's the reality that is out there. If it runs their software quickly, users couldn't care less about what the CPU type is, and that includes high-end server applications as well.
I realize
Well...you just did. Trying to help Linus?
Does Linus really get off on trolling or something?
I guess you can attribute his anti-Itanium stance to the fact that he collects his paycheck from an x86-64 licensee, but that wouldn't explain all the nonsense he spouts on the gcc mailing list, his opposition to kernel debuggers (because people who use debuggers aren't 31337 enough), etc.
The fact of the matter is that the Itanium line delivers superior performance at a lower price than its competitors, while maintaining that elegant architecture that Linus decried.
Well, CISC makes programming a compiler easier, yes. But you only have to do that once. The idea here is that a RISC chip with a horribly complex compiler is a win over a CISC chip with a simple compiler, because the compiler can do a lot of stuff at compile-time, using a big window (the entire program if necessary), while the CISC chip has to do everything at run-time using a small window (the current instruction plus any lookahead). This makes deep pipelines increasingly slow. Sure, it's a gigantic pain in the ass to properly order instructions for pipelining, but the compiler is in a better position to do this efficiently than the CPU is (and what's more, it only has to do it once, instead of at run-time).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
When I say 3D rendering I don't mean openGL/DirectX rendering....I mean full raytraced, reflection/refraction with global illumination, complex shaders, etc. With scenes as complex as I'm working with, I'm still looking at rendertimes of upwards of an hour per frame.
And as for video editing. Take a 1920x1080 (max HDTV) clip in raw 1 targa per frame format, add gradients, filters, masks, particle effects, 3d camera movements and lighting, and tell me you can buffer more than a few seconds in RAM. Don't believe me? Go download the demo version of Combustion from Discreet and try it.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
The expanded memory hack worked but most programs later on only worked with extended memory which the 286 could not do.
The 80286 could indeed run in extended memory mode. I quite happily ran both Coherent and Xenix 286 on a OLD NEC APC IV. 286-12, 640KB base with a 2MB extended memory card maxed out (my dad worked for NSM at the time). What the 286 did NOT have was a flat address mode; This meant that you had to use Bondage & Domination opps I meant segment & offset to address your memory.
BWP
(forefeiting my modpoints for this thread): Linus doesn't like the Itanium (neither do I), he is in control of what gets into the kernel, and he probably is benevolent enough to let Itanium-specific changes to flow in. BUT, does his negative view of Itanium pose any potential problem for Linux on Itanium?
Sigged!
...who gives a rat's ass what Linus thinks. It's not like can not let Linux be used on the CPU. Besides, FreeBSD is the way to go.
Well, it wouldn't exactly be the first time Linus said something silly, now would it?
Microsoft can provide a Server OS for Itanium and x86-64. They can balk on providing a desktop OS for either architecture.
Which is fine. The 32 bit versions of their desktop OS's will run just fine on x86-64. If the architecture turns out to be a winner, then they can optimize it. But I do seem to recollect reading MS will support x86-64. But don't quote me, I can't find the source right now.
A fast FP is nice. But this does not matter for the majority of applications. I am no guru but I don't think, FP is that important for database and webservers. The scientific market is quite small, so how would the Itanium be placed?
Well, if I remember it correctly, _the_ OS guru, Tanenbaum, said something like "Linux is obsolete".
Look where we are now.
Dreaming and being idealistic is a good thing: It pushes creativity and motivation.
But do never forget that dreams are subjective. Maybe you can persuade similar thinking folks. But can you convince a world where objectivity rules?
People don't care about superiour and clean designs. They care about speed, price and reliability. And they are right this way. Blaming them on being short-sighted is something that is _really_ obsolete.
Linus never forgot these facts. I think this is one of his biggest strengths.
No, Sun is not dying. If you think so, you don't understand Sun (which it seems, represents 95% of the posters and moderators on /.)
I have serious doubts that Linus knows how to design a simple multiplier, let alone speak with any sort of authority on CPU architecture.
What will we have next? Pamela Anderson talking about compiler design?
Go here for a really good summary of current CPUs.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
There is no chance of seeing a Power 4 or 5 in an Apple machine. They are IBMs high end server processors.
The PPC970 however is a different matter. Based on the Power 4 core with AltiVec, minus the on chip level 3 cache and multiple cores (though going back to multiple cores is a possibility when they improve their fabrication to 90nm from 130nm)
Don't blame me - this
OK, here is a question. Both current IE32 archs are better than AI64 on specint but worse on SpecFP.
:)
However, AFAIK (I could be and probably is, wrong) a large part of this is because the way the FP unit on IA32 works. The original spec was for the 386 with an EXTERNAL FPU unit, the 387. This mandated an instruction set design that forced all the FP data through an external pipe and an internal stack on the FPU. When the 486 had the FPU on board the same instruction set was used for backwards compatibility ad infinitum and we are still living with that legacy. So in theory, if Chipzilla and MD designs a better FPU instruction set for IA 32 it could be much better. The problem lies in the way programs address the FP unit which is not necessary.
Of course, floating point numbers have more bits than 32 (64 or 80 as I recall) so the 64 bit data bus and processing ability may also make a difference.
Anyone care to elaborate? Or did I fall off the bus somewhere in the last 5 years. I last programmed FPU code for a 387
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
OK. We ran timesharing on my Radio Shack CoCo with 64k and OS/9. (The MicroWare OS/9, a Unix clone of long ago, not the new Mac thing.) One user on the console, one user on the bit-banger serial port. Not much throughput, but never criticize a dog for misspelling a word. Later I got the hardware serial port, and that might have made the exercise almost meaningful.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
So...are you saying that the Itanium2 will be Doom III certified? Now if only the video card guys would come up with a Doom III certified card with dual 1.1 GHz chips we'll be able to actually play the game when it is released.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
> Of course, Linus works for a chip maker...
> So he is more likely to know what he's talking about.
Briliant thought. Along the same lines:
Of course, a soldier works for a war maker...
So he is more likely to know what he's talking about.
Sure - ask a soldier what it's like to kill people; he'll spell out the details. Now ask him to give a balanced and unprejudiced account of the pros and contras of attacking - say - Iraq... Even an answer from the current Bush administration would make more sense!
No doubt Linus is not doing a PR campaign while actually believing in Itanium's superiority, but your critique againts "cynicism" and "reflective commentary" just doesn't make sense.
Hmm. If only some people would reflect...
--
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
At the risk of being moderated down, again, I have to say that Linus should heed his own words. Has anyone seriously looked at the Linux kernel lately? It is suffering from serious code bloat.
To quote "Let he who is without [fault] cast the first stone."
IBM Power4+ at 1.4 GHz is about 20% faster than P4 at 3 GHz for floating point operations. And according to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7973 Power5 will be 4 times faster than Power4 and debut at 1.5 GHz or higher. I can't wait to see Power5 inside a big iron Apple Xserve.
The floating point power of Itanium 2 at 1 GHz is about 50% more than P4 at 3GHz, and Intel knows that clock rate is not equal to processing power.
While virtually every top microprocessor designer outside Intel laughs at the x86 architecture, Linus just loves it for some reason, which is why he never bother to tweak the Linux kernel for anything other x86.
And incidentally, Linus also had some very nasty comments about Mac OS X and Mach Microkernel a year or two ago. Does it ever occur to him that Apple, IBM and Intel might know better on these things?
"Linus drank the kool-aid" ?????????
You would equate accepting a salaried position with blindly following a cult leader in an act of mass suicide and murder? What are you, 13 ?
And/or never heard of Jim Jones and throws around phrases you don't grok?
And it's, what, only a hojillion times more expensive than a P4 that gets about 75% of the same score? It only consumes about 150W of power, weighs 2.3743 metric tons with the heatsink on, and sterilizes small children.
Whoopty-do: you don't think, given essentially unlimited dollars (Intel and HP have spent, what, 5 or 6 billion on this, right?) that someone else could have come up with a processor that scores 30% better on SPEC than a commodity processor?
I hate SGI, but I have an EIGHT processor box that consumes less power than a SINGLE processor Itanium 2. And while 600MHz R14ks suck, they don't suck that much.
You mean the one that IBM architecture with AT legacy devices attached has always used. I own two PC's, no Macs, but I have no misconceptions about the roots and limitations.
Unfortunately real technological development will always be hindered by commercial and egotistical issues.
And lets be honest - that whole backwards commpatibility thing is a bit of a chicken-bone in the throat. At least with linux you can recompile most of the software to run on a new architecture.
Looking at that graph - the scatter - I didnt see the G4 or PPC chips there. I personally think the better future is parallel processors as opposed to faster, more expensive, more power hungry superchunks.
Right now I think more development in software engineering would push the tech barrier furthar than the chip developments.
Most software cant even take advantage of current processors as well as it should yet.
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
Didn't you Yanks finance, not only Saddam Hussein to combat the Iranians,
About 1% of Iraq's military came from the US in the 1980's. The vast majority came from the Soviet Union, with sizable minorities coming from (in order) France, North Korea, and West Germany.
[and] Osama bin Laden to combat the Soviets in Afghanistan
No. The US gave support to many Afghan groups, including those not friendly to the US, with the foreknowledge that these groups were not friendly to the US. Bin Laden hated the US so much even then that had he known of any US presence in his fiefdom, he would have had them killed.
So stupid bastard, what is the REAL beef the Arabs have with the US, besides protecting THEM from Israel?
RISC pros:
In raw CPU performance RISC is superior to CISC because it is easier to pipeline, thus higher frequencies can be attained.
RISC cons:
CISC instructions inherently conserves memory bandwidth by being more complex, and being more densly packed. (Thus RISC pograms tend to be longer, however larger caches on RISC tend to alleviate this disadvantage)
I386 sucks, extending it will most likely end up with you implementing two separate cores, thus wasting transistors that could be used better in a clean 64 bit instructionset, I think IA64 is the way to go.
FYI:
All new CISC processors (P2,P3,P4, dunno about P, never bothered to look) are basically CISC to RISC interpretters.
Do people take Linus' words from "Ooh, Linus spoke! [insert praise and worship here]", to "Just another businessman trash-talking the competition"?
Linus, is in the chip-manufacturing business, you know. Not everything the man says is gospel from On High.
I know this will get modded as Troll, but you know, fuck it, I'm really tired of when Linus sneezes every OSS person bows down and grovels.
Does it produce code that is any good?
Except for some very specialized applications, GCC generated code is within 15% of ICC generated code on IA-32. My application is actually 5% faster when compiled with GCC.
I'd be very surprised if the same is true for IA-64.
Intel's invincible 'Titanicium' chip will be sinking soon...
"Code size matters. Price matters. Real world matters. And ia-64... falls flat on its face on ALL of these."
Ease of use matters. Ease of installation matters. Hardware support matters. Linux falls flat on its face on ALL of these.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
As x86 instruction decoder wants FEW extra bits in cache in order to allow multiple issue, actually, thats atleast 3 per byte. Now the trace cache is even worse. So I don't care if you can crank more instrcutions in your 32kb cache, I'm more interested, if your cache is double the size, and you can fetch and decode twice as many instructions, like real issues. BTW: L1 instruction cache can be quite huge, as its only small branch prediction penalty.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
I always knew what the size was going to be with int32 and int64 and the like. I've always wondered why more groups (OSes? PLs?) don't make these kinds of types explicit. I mean, for a 64-bit arch, what do you use for a 32-bit int? Do they add another primitive type to C/C++/Java/any other PL?
Why not use the obvious?
8-PP
MOD THIS UP. Good Info!
The C99 standard has a lot of answers for this, such as intN_t where N=8,16,32... etc. They even have intptr_t for those who wish to convert void* to int and back. Also, intmax_t which holds whatever the largest integer data type is, and a few other special types. If you don't have <inttypes.h> on your system, read the standard, roll your own (which isn't hard), and USE IT.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Intel chip won't sell for $3000 in 2 years. The are just milking the early adapters, who are probably also patient enough to put up with some bugs, as long as Intel remedies it with a new chip (!). You know there will be bugs.
Granted, this is a steeper premium than say, the new PIV vs. PIII, but it's a leap up in architecture and it's aimed at servers. I say, Itanium $500 or less in 2 years.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Actually, there's an ironic truth to this. Since Java is a virtual machine that's compiled just in time into code, all Java programs will benefit from being compiled into 64 bits without recoding. All you need is a just in time 64 bit compiler and a 64 bit JVM and you're all set.
C and C++ programmers don't have it so easy. They can't just get a 64 bit GCC and compile their code. Any non-trivial C/C++ program will need to be upgraded to support 64 bits.
So on the x86-64, Java programs may actually be faster than most (32 bit) C/C++ programs.;-)
That app has since been ported to FreeBSD, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, and Netware. The Netware was tough (no pthreads) but the Unixes were, like, five minutes to get the right link statements and such into the Makefile.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Boring.
[FUCK BETA]
Both barrels, the pistol, and then a baseball bat.
Go Linus!
This is common hacker jargon. If you've never seen it before, you should relay check out the jargon file here
is one reference.
And this is what it says:
baroque
adj.
[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of elephantine or monstrosity but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output. Now that is baroque!" See also rococo.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
That's because you're using the wrong computer. You should be using a SGI.
Zodiac Survey
High-quality raytracing of complex scenes is extremely CPU intensive, not memory intensive. More memory beyond 4 GB won't help you there unless you have extremely complex scenes. Yes, it will take a long time per frame, and yes, 64-bit processors will help improve compute time, but more memory is *not* needed there, a better processor is needed.
Video editing doesn't need a few seconds at a time in RAM for most applications. That was the point I was trying to make. So you picked an image size of about 64-MB; big deal. Assuming you have full-screen processing kernels [filters and masks, in your words], gradients that are implemented as images instead of formulae, and movement and lighting that are not processed as simple matrix ops, then you are doing a great deal of wasteful processing. There are processors designed to do that -- and those are NOT the Intel x86 or Itanium chipset or the AMD chipsets. Memory isn't the problem, the choice of algorithms and processors is.
I'll say it again -- chose applications that match your class of machine. If your problem doesn't match the machine you are on, get a different machine. Don't think that just because a PC is good for word processing and web browsing that it is good for video editing, because it isn't.
frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
read my other comments to see why an SGI is not appropriate for the work I am doing.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
We dont do enough video editing to warrant a dedicated high-end video setup
We dont do quite a bit of super high poly+raytrace work...but because its architectural, it rules out most software packages (Maya sucks for trying to model buildings, and I need to work quite a bit with the industry standard-AutoCAD)
I know full well that my machine isn't optimal for video editing...we purchased Combustion, not Inferno or Flame. I also must use the workstation for web development and graphic design as well (and some network admin stuff)....in short, my time is to divided for my company to purchase a machine optimized for each of the myriad of tasks I must do....which is why we have a maxed out x86 solution....because the machine (and my time) is needed for more than one task
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
that should be "we do quite a bit..."
should've hit preview
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
You're a pinheaded literalist and a coward.
The phrase has been used in innocuous context for a couple of decades.
Grow up.
When you talking about 3D models, the memory required to hold the frambuffer pales in comparision to the amount needed to hold the models. The OP wasn't making a point about video cards.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Also, some CPUs have 32 bit modes - AMD's x86-64 actually lets 32-bit and 64-bit code segments share the CPU (the OS must be 64 bits for this to work).
Actually, the Alpha EV7 may be even faster, but HP is suppressing benchmarks.
See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7034 for more info.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
The problem is that most OSS projects are too big for a classroom project (basically equivalent to a 2-week project in the real world; we have 12-14 weeks but the students have 5 or 6 things [classes,work] to do, and you usually need to teach them something before they can start with the project).
:) (I'm a prof at SPSU)
At least that's my problem
About every 10 years or so Intel produces a politically correct processor. That is, a processor that would make any academic proud, but that is totally useless. In 1980 they built the 432. Google on it to find out how twisted this thing was. Later, they did the i860 (academically perfect, practically useless). Now, they have produced the Itanium.
It won't kill them. And, in 10 years someone will post a message like this on
Stonewolf
It's the old Microsoft stratagy all over again!!! Change the base (ie. os or hardware) and force the software vedors to change to match you just because you were too lazy or greedy to match the accomidate the current software base. Then who pays for the changes? In commercial software, the buyers. In Open source, it's the coders.
- In 1899, a US patent officer suggested closing the patent office because "everything that can be invented has already been invented."
- In the days of the 386, someone (can't remember who) said something to the effect of "why bother trying to make faster processors? The world has all of the power they need in the 386!:
- In the days of DOS, someone said something to the effect of "What could you possibly want to do that requires more than 640K of memory?"
Of course, this argument would be better if I had the time to look up the people who made these observations, but the point is still the same. Right now, I'm happy with my Duron 1300MHz, but then again I once thought that the 486 was the best idea since the keyboard. Who knows, maybe 5-10 years from now, all home PCs, work stations, servers, even Beowulf Clusters will be using 64-bit chips. And we'll all be wondering, "How on earth did I survive with that Duron shit?"How many slashes would a slashdot dot, if a slashdot could dot slashes?
x86 isa just plain sucks
Hey, WinNT ran on a PowerPC a long time ago. Maybe its time to make a comeback?
If not, there's always a 64 bit WinCE. Everyone needs a 64 bit handheld with a GUI so they can get awesome drag and drop with a stylus!
This is my sig.
Hopefully the person thanked <deity>, not some diet guru...
I18N == Intergalacticization
ahh fond memories the AT brings back. I remember mine having about 5megs (1 on board and 4 sipps). Prohaps I should boot it up again and see if it still works.