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Red Hat Releases x86_64 Technology Preview, GinGin

Posted by Hemos on from the trying-it-out-the-new-stuff dept.

HTMLSpinnr writes "Red Hat announced today it's release of GinGin64, a "Technology Preview" (read: not beta) of Red Hat's AMD64 technology. You can grab a copy here or at one of Red Hat's various mirrors. Though the version number listed in the release notes is 8.0.95, inside sources say it's based on Red Hat 9 plus some updates."

2 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Overheard at Intel... by Glock27 · · Score: 5, Informative
    "This thing is a steaming pile of crap, and we've spent almost ten years and billions of dollars!"

    OK, it wasn't overheard at Intel. But it should have been.

    SPEC2000 scores:

    Itanic2/1 GHz.: 810/1174 int/fp
    Opteron: 1202/1170 int/fp

    The integer score is important for many general-purpose computing tasks, like web serving and database.

    Gee, Opteron is MUCH less expensive, performs better, runs up to 8-way with off the shelf components and runs your 32-bit x86 code twice as fast and absolutely compatibly. Let me think about this... ;-)

    --
    Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
    Score: -1 100% Flamebait
  2. Re:Is it worth it? by ShonFerg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, the biggest speed boost from operating in 64-bit mode comes from the fact that Opteron/Athlon 64 has twice the general purpose and SSE registers, and also is the first AMD processor to support SSE2. The low register count has always been a stumbling point for x86 processors compared to other technologies like the PowerPC, which have many, many more. This is the fastest and most vital memory to any processor so adding more was an awesome decision, but of course they only work in 64-bit mode.

    The fact that it's 64-bit will only help you (double the speed, actually) if you're operating on 64-bit variables, which don't come up in general software very much, but are very good for scientific research, simulations, etc.

    And yes, you can directly address more than 4GB of memory... in fact each processor has it's own memory controller built in which also adds to the speed a bit and means that in multi-processor systems each processor gets its own bank of DIMMs.

    There's a wonderful article over at ArsTechnica which does a great job of explaining all the benefits of the x86-64 technology here.

    --Shon