Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Commits to Using Opteron
the_1000th_Monkey writes "According these articles at The Inquirer, Infoworld, and The Register Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will support AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. Beta releases can be expected in the middle of this year. Here is MS's official press release."
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will support AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. Beta releases can be expected in the middle of this year.
A slashdot story where Microsoft are the good guys! What have you done with the real Timothy?! Taco! Help, Taco!!
64-bit Blue Screen of Death!
And does this make AMD part of the Axis of Evil now?
Once upon a time, Windows NT ran on Pentium, Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and possibly other CPUs. AMD will be a member of the Axis of Evil until Microsoft decides the time has come to cut its throat, as it has with so many other of its "partners."
WMD = Windows of Mass Destruction?
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
This is no news to me. I remember reading that AMD was delaying their 64-bit processors until next fall, the reason was apparently that they wanted to have a version of Windows to run on it.
It is therefore no surprise that Microsoft announces an appropriate version of Windows in the same time frame!
Microsoft was the primary development partner with AMD on the x86-64 instruction set. What MS wanted, AMD delivered. And it's great! Not like that crappy HP/Intel Itanium fiasco.
Also I think many people will be dissapointed with the 32bit performance and AMD might get a bad name for it. I disagree. I've spoken to some people who work in the Windows server team, and they have told me that 32 bit performance has been almost as good on the Opterons as on 32 bit processors. And the 64 bit version of Windows is very, very fast.
Microsoft has had access to Opterons for quite a while now, and they seem very eager to push it over Intel's reason for the simple reason that the Opteron allows for legacy programs to work.
The whole point of AMD's 64 bit chip is to allow both 64 bit and old/current 32 bit apps to run together smoothly.
Can't wait for the desktop version.
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
64 bit instruction set for faster low level functions, faster 64 bit pipes
This is just plain wrong. 64-bit words at the CPU level has no direct effect on instruction speed, unless you make tricky optimizations, like packing 32-bit variables into a single 64-bit register and doing operations on them simultaneously (which, in general, isn't that useful, BTW). Yes, there are a couple places where wider registers could be useful (bulk data transfers, etc) but there really aren't that many. Some people have mentioned higher-precision arithmetic, but IMHO, if you need that, you're using the FPU anyway, and thus have had 64-bit (80-bit internally) precision for some time now.
The main reason the Opteron is a good thing is because 1) it provides MORE registers, allowing the compiler to make smarter register allocations, which can provide drastic performance improvements, and 2) it provides access to a larger address space, meaning you can finally have >4GB of memory without nasty paging hacks. Of these, only the first is really that useful to your average Joe, which is why you're only going to see the Opteron in higher-end workstations and servers for the immediate future... at least, IMHO.
x86-64 is scarecly a hack, it's a pretty significant re-engineering effort that actually addresses many of the complaints about the ia32 architecture (like register starvation).
As for why WinXP doesn't play well on the Itanium - it's a hard problem. The ia64 architecture is completely new and is using a lot of concepts which are not well understood. It relies very, very heavily on compilers being tailored for it - there are still huge performance gaps between the various compilers claiming ia64 as a target (HP, for example, are still running 20-30% better than Intel's compiler).
Intel have screwed themselves here - their product is too radical a shift to make it easy for vendors to adapt.