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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."

8 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Great by CausticWindow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anybody know about any (realatively new) versions of Linux for Itanium that one could benchmark this against? Preferably free of charge?

    --
    How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
    1. Re:Great by vadim_t · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, unless your budget is unlimited, or whatever you're working on is not paralellizable, price/performance is still more important than the performance of an individual CPU. I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll have to switch to using multiple CPUs anyway.

  2. Is it worth it? by AlistairGroves · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So how big are the performance gains? And does this make it worth holding out for the Athlon 64 proccessors?

    1. Re:Is it worth it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      ...plus the marketing value. A pointy haired boss drool for buzzwords, if it ain't "64-bit" it's not interesting. Trust me, it's like this IRL. Running a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit arch sounds "half efficient" for the PHB.

      -smurk

  3. Debian? by g4dget · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How is the Debian support for the 64bit AMD chips coming along?

  4. recompile by dpilot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But how good would a recompile for Itanium with gcc really be? I've been under the impression that the only really decent compiler for IA64 came from Intel/HP. It's a tough target to compile for.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  5. ROTFL by Fefe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, right, like you log in to a public free Itanic server to run some benchmark and expect to be a) the only user of that machine and b) that nobody logs in and skews your numbers while the benchmark runs.

    Besides, Itanic is a horrible performer in day to day tasks. I compiled my libc project on a 900 MHz Itanic II and it was outperformed by a factor of four by my 900 MHz Pentium 2 notebook.

    I'm talking about the compilation speed here. Transcoding MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 is also a lot slower, a German university group did some Itanic assembly optimizations to learn about the architecture, and their code was still much slower than an Athlon XP+ 2000.

    In short: forget about Itanic. The architecture is doomed.

  6. Re:There is a non-monetary cost of 64-bit, too. by g4dget · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Breaking the 4G of memory does come at a cost, though. If your code uses a whole lot of pointers (many CAD & EDA packages do), then because the pointers take up twice the space they used to, you'll need up to 8G of physical memory to do the same task you could do with 4G on a 32-bit system. And twice the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth, too. It's a pretty steep cost!

    That may be true for your average, poorly written desktop software, but it is false for well-written scientific or engineering software.

    Such software usually uses arrays and indexes that are determined by problem size, as opposed to making everything a pointer. Many such programs may use 8 bit or 16 bit indexes for most of their data. Going to a 64 bit processor often will not affect the memory footprint of such programs significantly.