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AMD, Transmeta Edge Up In Market Share
prostoalex writes "The new Mercury Research report on the microprocessor market is out, and it looks like the little guys are gaining ground. AMD now owns 15.7% of the market, instead of 15.6% a year ago, while Transmeta and other manufacturers went from 1.7% to 1.8% in a single year. Intel owns 82.5% of the market instead of 82.8% a year ago. News.com.com also notices: 'The competition between the two companies will shift into high gear over the remainder of the year. On Sept. 23, AMD will release the Athlon64, a new desktop chip that can run 32-bit and 64-bit software.'"
Wait, what market are we talking about?
Oh, right: "Mercury's numbers include so-called x86 processors shipped for inclusion in desktops, notebooks, servers and Xboxes."
So, these numbers don't tell us anything about the chips in Macs, Suns, SGIs, mainframes, Crays, Playstations, Palms, VCRs, cars, vaccuum cleaners, or toaster ovens. Just that Wintel stuff.
(warning: I'm just tossing this out from memory without doing any double-checking on it first, so read with caution and pay attention to replies.)
I believe that's basically what they're already doing.
If I understood what I read correctly, the "X86" CPUs on the market aren't really X86 CPUs anymore. Instead, they are essentially a super-fast hardware emulator of an instruction set. The real instruction set of these chips doesn't resemble X86 *at all*; the chip decodes on the fly from the X86 macro-ops down to the chip's native micro-ops, which are smaller and simpler and easier to track when running in parallel across several execution units.
That's part of why most software emulation is so slow -- you are in essence comparing generalized software solutions to incredibly well-engineered hardware solutions.
If we had a different instruction set, would we really benefit? For the vast majority of us, even the Slashdot crowd, no. The compiler guys would probably like it a lot, but very few programmers work in anything lower than C. The actual "machine language" is mostly unimportant. And it's not even REALLY the machine language of the chip anymore!
Even assembly coders, these days, are writing in a form of interpreted language. The "bare metal" guys aren't REALLY at the bare metal anymore; even they are working at a level of abstraction.
Intel actually is TRYING to break from x86 with the Itanium line, they invested Billions and billions of dollars to do so. They had a hardware x86 emultator tacked on that is so anemic that it is outperformed by a chip two generations older at the same clock speed (the P3 running at Itanium speeds trounces it for legacy 32bit code), throw in the fact that it is WAY behind the current 32bit chips in clock speed and you get a not-so-impressive product if the majority of your code is legacy. Then they decided their software tech was good enough that they could get better performance out of a software translator, they did, but only about 30% faster average then the hadware unit, still too slow. Compare this to AMD with the Athlon64/Opteron which runs 32bit code at least as fast clock for clock as the previous generation (ususally faster due to larger cache), and is running at about the same clock speeds. On the software emulation as part of a platform switch, it has been done twice, once with Apple and the 68k->PPC transition (quite sucessfull), and once by DEC and the Alpha team with FX!32 which was a software translation layer that would dynamically recompile x86 NT4 programs to native Alpha code, it didn't work all that well despite the Apha being vastly superior to anything Intel made at the time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.