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Is Prescott 64-bit?
unassimilatible writes "According to The Inquirer, Intel's new Prescott has 64 bit instructions lurking inside. Could really rain on the parade of those who thought the new Athlon 64's would be supreme - especially when you look at Intel's price roadmap. Don't run out and buy an Athlon 64 just yet..."
Or there will be virtuly no software for it when it comes out and for months to come. AMD has had books on the x86-64 instruction set for years now. Not to mention emulators have been available for almost as long.
The "Prescott" has 2 32 bit cores, but the "secondary" core is missing an AGU, among other things, and this is pointing to the fact that most Prescotts have some sort of 64 bit functionality in them, but their keeping their lips shut about it?
So it seems to me that possibly Intel are waiting to see how AMD's 64 bit chip goes, and if its going better as a 32/64 bit chip then Intel's Itanium, release their Prescott with "fully" added 64 bit functionality?
Am i correct in my logic? I can't really follow why they're keeping tight about it.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Since 1997, all my machines have been AMD's. The K6-2 is still alive, actually. One of them (a Duron 600) has been running 24x7 for the last 3 years. My gaming rig's a dual Athlon MP2000+. My current workstation's an Athlon XP2400+. I've NEVER had any problems with them, either hardward or software (Linux).
... I know. I've administered Intel-based servers).
My biggest problem is what to do with the old mobos and processors that I put aside due to upgrading.
No, I've never had a reason to spend more for so little (it's even arguable whether you get more for spending more
For one thing, I wonder what its physical external address bus looks like. Can it address more than 4GB of physical memory without paging? The Athlon64 and Opteron can. In addition, they are discounting the benefits of an on-board memory controller. This feature alone is a huge performance boost. To top it off, AMD gear comes with HyperTransport and a host of other goodies associated with AMD, like nForce chipsets with the best on-board sound of any integrated solution (and I don't suspect this will be different with nForce3 chipsets). In short, it seems like Intel is starting a concerted marketing blitz against AMD but with little avail. With the Prescott and this new extreme edition P4 with 2.5MB cache (I shudder at the yield hit that much cache has per wafer for them), we have a lot of sudden refocus towards Intel just prior to the launch. Product quality counts, but so does marketing.
I don't know if this "dual 32-bit" thing is very plausible. Being able to do 64-bit operations is perhaps the most useless feature of the upcoming 64-bit processors. The big things about AMD64 is the larger compiler-visible register file and the ability to address > 4GB of memory.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It seems to me that they would probably go with an instruction set that is semantically isomorphic to AMD's, but uses slightly different opcodes. This way you could get a compiler to target the new architecture just with only modifications to the assembler, leveraging the existing effort to port software to the AMD 64-bit architecture, and AMD could easily release a new generation of chips supporting both opcode formats, making the "Intel" x86-64 architecture a standard. And AMD would probably do this if the Intel processors are successful, because they could become marginalized otherwise (even if their's was first!).
This is no flame bait, it is Intel's business practice. They have done it over and over and over, if any of you were alive during the 80's you'd know about intel's 32bit move with the 386 which took forever to come out, meanwhile... other people released 32bit solutions, mostly NS and Motorola. Intel's FUD machine went into high gear and told customers to hold on since the 386 was going to be out any day then and was going to be the best processor ever. So better processors that were years ahead of the 386 got killed that way.
In the 90s Intel did the same with the Pentium and the R4000s that were going to be the basis for the ARC platform. Intel said that the Pentium was going to be out any day then and it was going to run circles around the RISC machines. The pentium was at least 4 years late and was well behind RISC offerings in performance. But Intel managed to kill the ARC consortium.
This is the latest in Intels FUD campaign, maybe it is time to break the circle... buy intel and have 64bits TODAY... screw them, with their "ooooh we may have a surprise for you" and all that nonsense.
Underneath the X86 bytecode VM, Pentium IVs, Athlons, etc. are highly advanced RISC cores with multiple concurrent execution units
But the instruction set still hobbles the design in many ways. The logic to convert x86 instructions to micro-ops takes up space on the die and uses extra power. And any way you look at it, you have to read from memory a lot more often with 8 "general purpose" registers than 32 real GPRs, which is what most sane CPUs have. Itanium doesn't have to do this, PowerPC doesn't have to do this, no modern ISA requires this nonsense. Sure they may have figured out how to get it to run fast anyway, but this is wasted time: Intel should have been able to transition desktop PCs to the i960 in the early nineties, and we would probably be making a trivial upgrade to a 64-bit extension of it just about now. The processor would have all the fancy performance-enhancing features of a modern P4, but would not be held back by the need to emulate a 286.
The main reason that the huge expensive power sucking Itanium scrapes out a small lead in benchmarks over X86 CPUs is because of its expensive huge power sucking cache.
It doesn't just "scrape out a lead" in floating-point benchmarks, it absolutely destroys the x86 competition. And oh yeah, its running at what, half the clockspeed of the P4? If Itanium had the same economies of scale behind it at this point, there would be no competition.
MS has been long rumored to tell Intel what they can and can not do, and their record in confrontations like this are not one to bet against. Rumor has it that the vole has said that they will only support a single 64-bit extension to IA32, but then months ago they said they would be supporting 5 64-bit architectures in windows.
does this mean the chip will be tailored for the MS OS?
will it be totally worthless if you buy a system and load a different OS?
I'll stick with Intel, thanks. Any of you guys actually have a *good* AMD processor?
Well, I've got the old K5PR133 sitting on a shelf now that did years of sterling service, first as my main desktop CPU, then moving back to the firewall CPU, until it got replaced by the K6 II 350 (which is still in the firewall machine, and has been there, running solidly, day in, day out since about 1999, and was my desktop CPU before that,replacing the K5).
Replaced the K6 II with an Athlon 700 (original slot A). That ran fine, until the board fritzed, due to the old capacitor problem that ran rampant in late 99, early 2000.. The board lasted until 2002. The only reason it's not in the firewall box now is that I can't get another board for less than it'd cost to put a faster athlon in a cheap board..
The 2002 set I bought was a nice Athlon 1700 in an Abit board. Ran stably and never a problem.. That's now in the girlfriend's machine (built one for her from the last generation of hardware I had lurking), and now I'm using an NForce2 board with an Athlon 2500 (Barton core).
No problems with any of them.
If the college computer broke, are you sure it's the CPU? Not memory, motherboard, power supply or any of a myriad of other issues?
For the laptop, is it a problem with the manufacturers not putting good cooling and airflow in the laptop (or, heaven forbid, a desktop CPU in a laptop case to save money/add a little extra speed)?
By all means, stick with Intel if it keeps you happy, but I've had a long history of using AMD chips, and I like 'em. If I saw a reason to use Intel's chips, I would.. I just never have to date...
People just assume that G5 consumes this enormous amount of power because of all the fans in the G5 desktop. This isn't true. Even the 2G takes only about 40 watts or so. One P4 3G takes in the range of 80 watts of power. All of the extra G5 fans are to make the cooling quieter.
I'm glad to see someone finally point this out. The exact wattage number is 46.7 watts for the 2 GHz PowerPC 970 "G5" running at full speed (2GHz CPU and a 2:1 multipler for a 1 GHz FSB).
A 2.4 GHz P4 (400 MHz FSB) uses 62 watts, newer P4s use even more. Prescott is expected to use 100 - 105 watts. (And this is totally ignoring the even further power needs of the "extreme" edition with its added transistors for on-die L3 cache)
Apple has always seemed to overengineer the heatsinks and fans in their desktop model, for about as long as I can remember. Oddly, many of the PowerBooks use a much different "transfer the heat from the CPU, Chipset, and GPU right to the bottom of the case" cooling method.
Intel has access to the AMD64 ISA from AMD as part of their cross-licensing deal years ago. The big thing is that if Intel comes out with ANOTHER 64 bit ISA, then all of their Itanium customers (and co-developer HP) who have invested billions in the Itanium will be very angry.
My bet is that Intel won't go anywhere near 64bit on the desktop for a very long time (like never). We will see dual (or more) cores before that ever happens (which is slated for '05).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
And why isn't there an Itanium 2 or Power4 running at the same clockspeed as the P4? It's because they can't. To do more work per clock, they use more logic, and that takes more time. Don't you think that Intel would have a 3.2 GHz Itanium on the market now if it were technically feasible?
All of these CPUs use similar fabrication technology. This technology is capable of a certain number of fundamental logic operations per second per square millimeter. The P4 uses high clockspeeds only because it is marketed to users who think that MHz==performance. If marketing requirements were different, the P4 would have been designed to get the same performance out of 1/10th the clock speed with the same die size and the same manufacturing cost.
Then why, precisely, are you here chatting about Intel and AMD 64 bit chips when GNU/Linux has been running on 64bit DEC Alphas for over 5 years, And YellowDog Linux runs very nicely on the G5?
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That's the thing. Those solutions (including the Itanium) aren't x86 compatible in a practical way.
It's not such a big deal with open source software, but check out the price/performance of x86 desktop hardware and peripherals some time.
Ahhh. So there's another variable... you need x86 compatibility. that's a different animal than simply needing a 64bit Linux workstation as you initially stated. I will warn you: much open source software is written with x86 in mind and had things hard-wired to that platform. Even when things compile on a 64bit system, they tend to fail in interesting and unpredictable ways. I've found that ignorance and lazyness seem to prevail in the open source movement when it comes to truely portable software.
I don't know exactly what you mean by your last comment. I don't really know of any x86 specific hardware or peripherals except for the MBs and CPUs. Just about every other peripheral or piece of hardware will plug in to many Alphas and any recent Mac (drivers and firmware aside).
I've used many video and network cards off-the-shelf as well as standard RAM in my Alpha and use standard "PC" memory, drives and peripherals on my 5 year old Mac.
I have checked out x86 price/performance. It's not been enough to get me to purchase any of it. I get more real work done on my Mac per dollar than on x86 (no virus downtime, few system updates, etc), and my Alphas put out more heat per dollar than any x86 could in it's wet dreams.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people