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AMD Predicts End of 32-bit Processors
DDumitru writes "Infoworld
reports that AMD predicts it will stop producing 32-bit processors by the end
of 2005. By depending on price cuts for Athlon-64 and Opteron, AMD is predicting that
it's sales of 32-bit CPUs will fall off and obsolete 32-bit systems in less
than 3 years. This is either a push forward, or a tactic to try to capture the 64/32 bit
standard leaving Intel in the rear. Or it could just be hype." I'm not in a hurry to ditch any of my 32-bit machines, so long as I get them replaced by 2038.
.....forgive me for being captain obvious, but my old A7M266 board runs just fine with XP 2000+....they can continue dropping the price on these suckers so that eventually I can max it out with 2600+s and also plop two MP 2600+s in my A7M266-D.....I don't even use half the capacity now...I'll be blown away when I plop those in for $50 each in a year or so.....keep predicting the demise AMD, it's all fine with me.
With the prices rapidly dropping, and the performance (for the most part) seeming to be worth the money spent, this seems like the obvious direction. As far as replacing 32 bit machines, its just a matter of time, anyway.
I'm on a chair.
Unless AMD or someone else has a massive gain with respect to being able to cool these monster CPUs along with shrinking the die so that they are suitable in general consumer electronics, I don't think anyone is going to stop producing smaller/cooler CPUs. While the 64 bit chips are great and all, I just can't imagine seeing one in a phone (for example) or even a PDA in the timeframe that they suggest.
Maybe they meant to include that they won't go into these markets which limits their desire to produce low footprint, low heat chips.
As a user of open source, I think this shouldn't really be a problem at all, should it? I mean, once gcc can compile 64-bit code, than we should simply be able to recompile all of our current apps for these new processors, shouldn't we? I'd be happy if someone out there could point me out as not being in the know...
I read several of the reviews, and all stuck with 32 bit code for the comparition between the Intel P4 and the AMD Athalon 64. Linux runs on the Atahlon in 64 bit mode, wouldn't be hard to compile PovRay and Doom on a 64 bit compiler and see if anything changes. Thats just for an easy test.
Many real world (science?) applications benifit from 64 bit processors, find some (presumably running on UltraSparc, PPC, Alpha, or such) and port them over to see how the 64bit abilities of this chip compares to the other existing chips.
I run open source OSes, and open Source applications. I don't care about 32 bit performance because I'm fairly sure that if I did have an Athalon 64 I wouldn't run 32 bit code very often. I can choose between many chips, compatable instruction sets to me means gcc (or other compiler) has an output for them. 32 bit x86 compatiabily is nice for the few times I have to run something 32 bit (normally in Wine) and that doesn't happen very often.
Even when the desktop market moves on completely to 64 there will still be the embedded market that can use the 32 bit procs for processor intensive applications.
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http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/031014/145512_1.html
h
Hell 16 bit processors are alive and well!
most industrial PC104 form factor PC's are running 386 processors.
The 386 is a 32-bit processor.
(There was a later variant called the 386SX that used a 16-bit bus, but it wasn't popular, and anyway the CPU was still 32-bit).
According to Computer Shopper, AMD and Cray are collabarating on a new chip interconnect method, which they claim runs 20x the speed of current solutions, called 'Red Storm' ...
Just a 'news in brief' item, so no real details...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"I was sure that Intel had announced plans to integrate it's 64bit "Yamhill" extensions into the Prescott chip which should be launched early next year."
They haven't, and they wont, unless the Athlon64s begin to eat away at too much of Intel's market share. Intel's problem is that if it releases 64-bit extensions in Prescott, it will be forced to do so for the Xeon line as well. The problem with this is that it would send 10 years of research and development, along with countless Billions of dollars down the drain. Itanium relies on one thing and one thing only: a need for 64-bit processing. The few Itaniums that are selling will be the only ones sold if Intel's customers can get 64-bits on a Xeon.
Unless Intel is forced to, it's simply not going to do "64-bits on the cheap". Intel has nothing to gain by announcing or implementing 64-bit extensions now; we don't even know if the Athlon64s are going to sell. On the other hand, they have everything to lose if they do open up Prescott to 64-bit quickly. What Intel is probably doing now is scrambling to come up with ways to sell Itaniums to its customers once 64-bit Xeons are available. Itanium's miserable sales to date show that it has enough trouble just selling it as-is. Take away the one advantage it does have, and they may as well take it off the table now.
Aside from that, we have absolutely no idea how well Prescott's 64-bit extensions perform. We have no idea if they've been perfected, nor what kind of problems Intel has with them. We have no idea if bugs exist in the instructions, nor what sort of benefit we'd see from them. They could very well be based off of AMD's own 64-bit extensions (Intel has licensed the technology), which would make it rather embarassing to release them to the public. It would also constitute a huge and embarassing shift in position on the topic of 64-bits for home; something Intel has publicly stated is not something the market currently needs.
I'm not saying Intel wouldn't possibly announce 64-bit instructions in the near future - it could be tommorrow for all I know. All I'm saying is that everything points to Intel keeping the 64-bit extensions under wraps for as long as absolutely possible. As of right now, the only 64-bit instruction sets we know of (when it comes to Intel/AMD), are EPIC for Itanium and the ones from AMD. It's doubtful that Intel has secretly developed a whole brand new instruction set just for the P4, and it's even more doubtful that they somehow rigged the P4 to use Itanium's 64-bit instruction set. Thus, we're left with Intel banking on limited adoption of AMD's 64-bit CPUs, which does not appear to be the case thus far.
P.S. All signs point to Intel releasing the first handfull of Precotts around Feb of 2004, with volume closer to early Q2. Solving voltage leaks that push your operating temp to extremes isn't something you throw a bandaid on; it's something you design around. I just hope, for Intel's sake, that they aren't rushing Prescott out the door as they have on other chips (P3 1.13GHz).
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
There might have been some odd 8-bit machine that I don't know about that was used in NASA, but I would expect the bulk of the computing work for the Apollo program was done by Minicomputers and Mainframes which had basic addressable memory sizes of 12 or more bits.
I think that the key point of this article is that developers can now develop and test 32- and 64-bit apps on the same machine. With many high level languages (and even, to a certain extent, C/C++), it's fairly trivial to develop a version that compiles under both archs, especially if you're starting a new project (just have to watch your int & pointer sizes, etc). I think that a key attraction in CPU-intensive apps (games, multimedia creation/editing, scientific, etc.) will be the extra 8 general purpose registers available in 64-bit mode. They can produce order-of-magnitude performance increases for parameter passing, many inner-loops, etc.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I think 64 bit will take root at the servers and quickly force 64 bit processors out to the workstations. Even now, 4 GB of RAM in a server is a constraint in many businesses, and it will be much more pronounced in only a couple years.
Given this situation, Microsoft is bound to polish and market 64 bit Windows Server (which will soon be available for x86-64) because they know that 64 bit Linux distros are out or will soon be out. MS's place in the server world is far from secure, so it's in their interest to be as competitive as possible in this regard.
So, with servers (and high-end workstations) moving to 64 bit really soon, and the fact that one of x86's strengths is in volume manufacturing, the natural step (especially for AMD) is to move all chips to 64 bit in a fairly short time frame. Besides, the incremental cost per CPU is minimal, AMD claims somewhere around 10% die space. And, it takes more money to design and manufacture separate 32bit and 64bit chips than it does to sell a single product line.
I guess I don't think that any "killer app" is really required above and beyond what is out there already. Big fat database, email, and application servers that could use more than 4 GB of memory NOW.
"This may have been true but the average user just wants it to look good on paper."
(Bob) "Hey, Bill. I just got a new computer!"
(Bill) "I was thinking about getting a new one myself. Did you get one of those new Pentium 5 ones?"
(Bob) "Nope, one of the tech guys at work was telling me how those are only 32 bits, so I got one of these Athlon ones. They're 64 bits."
In the battle of bigger vs better, AMD has 64, Intel has 32. AMD introduced the model numbers for precisely the reason you raised - the average user has no idea what actually influences performance. The new AMD CPUs are set to ramp up in clock frequency very quickly, which will cause the model numbers to shoot up fast as well. What you'll end up with is Average Joe Consumer looking at Athlon64 4400+ & Pentium(?) 4Ghz. AMD is likely to pump up the "Their's is 32, our's is 64!" marketing, and regardless of whether the consumer has any clue whatsoever what that means, it makes AMD look better on paper.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Of course, this is completely independent of things like memory bandwith tricks (I/O with multiple words at a time) and vector processing (operating on multiple words at a time). But that is orthogonal to the underlying word size. '256-bit GPU' is just a marketing term, that has nothing to do with the amount of memory it can address or the number of bits of precision of the arithmetic, which is what is really meant by the CPU word size.
How can you say that with a strait(sic) face?
Because he actually knows what he's talking about. Here's a hint: the market for 8-bit processors is absolutely enormous even today. There's even a small but significant market for 4-bit processors. Do a little research.
(I can't believe the parent post is modded +3, Interesting.)
x86 may be an ugly hack, but it's not going away anytime soon, because it's far too much work to replace and x86 CPU makers have become so good at working around the limitations and extending x86 without throwing away backward compatibility (like with AMD64). Today x86 is only an instruction set, the CPUs do things very differently behind the scenes.
Comparing modern high-performance x86 CPUs with ARM is pointless IMHO. Making low-power, low and medium performance processors is one thing but competing with P4 and Opteron is quite another.
Make an ARM with big caches, OOO execution with advanced branch predictors, register renaming, SIMD, multiple execution units and clock speeds in the multi-GHz range and you'll probably end up with the same kind of die size and power consumption as the x86 CPUs.
I think the original poster meant that 32 bit computing won't die in the same sense that 8 bit computing is still alive, in controllers, etc. The same is true for AMD. All AMD said is they don't see themselves producing 32 bit processors around the end of 2005. The Athlon64 is the replacement for the venerable Athlon, first introduced in 1999. Athlon was a replacement for the K6. AMD stopped producing the K6 a couple years after the introduction of the Athlon, why would they produce 32 bit Athlons a couple years after the introduction of the Athlon64? After the first process shrink it's about as expensive to produce the new higher-transistor chip with the new smaller process/feature size as it is to make the old chip with smaller transistor number, but larger process/feature size. Many people seem to think that AMD not producing 32 bit processors means the end of 32 bit computing. That's obviously ridiculous as it'll take many years before 64 bit OSs are the norm. Remember that the whole point of the Athlon64 over the Itanium is that the Athlon64 has very good 32 bit support to make a transition go far more easily.
AccountKiller
'256-bit GPU' is just a marketing term, that has nothing to do with the amount of memory it can address or the number of bits of precision of the arithmetic...
Actually, what they mean by this is that the GPU can grab 256 bits in one bus cycle.
GPUs also use SIMD, which probably means that you can add 16 16-bit integers to 16 more 16-bit integers with signed saturation, or something like that, in the GPU.
You're right that the GPU can't address 2^256 bytes of memory and it doesn't use 256-bit integers or floats. But '256-bit GPU' is more than just a marketing term.
Since so many graphics modes are 32 bits per pixel now (and even more if you include a depth buffer, stencil buffer, etc.), you're probably talking about 8 pixels per bus cycle. This is of great advantage for GPUs.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Sure there is a market for 8-bit processors now, but will there be in 10 years? 50 years? There was a market for vacuum tube-based computers after transistors made them totally obsolete, but you sure as hell don't find anyone making vacuum tube based compared anymore (actually, knowing the Slashdot community, there probably is some wierdo out there doing just that, but I digress :> ).
The market for 8-bit chips is already starting to disapear. Why? Not because they are no longer useful, but because the difference in price between an 8-bit and a 32-bit chip these days is negligible, and if you can standardize ALL of your development on a single chip, so much the better. Why bother have one $2 8-bit chip to do one task, a $2 16-bit chip to do another task and a $2 32-bit chip to do a third task when you can do all three using $2 32-bit chips.
This is the same reason why AMD plans to stop making 32-bit desktop processors in the not-too-distant future. Already the difference in price between making the 64-bit Athlon64/Opteron and a theoretical 32-bit version of the same chip is very small (5% difference in die size according to many previous AMD documents, so probably about a 1-3% difference in total cost of production). That number will fall over the next two years to the point where it's totally pointless for them to bother making 32-bit chips anymore.
32-bit chips aren't going to disapear after 2005, but sooner or later they will. Hell, eventually ALL processors as we know them today are likely to be replaced, probably by something that none of us can even guess about today.
The larger addressable memory space is the primary advantage to using 64-bit chips. You also get 64-bit integer registers (generally speaking, though the addressable memory size and integer register size aren't always linked on all architectures, though if you have only one of the above I wouldn't really call it a 64-bit chip). For most applications, 64-bit registers don't get you anything, but there are a few situations where they do help.
:>
As for 64-bit on the desktop, I think that now is the time to start the move. Installed memory on desktops tends to double every 18-24 months. Right now 1GB is the norm for a high-end desktop. That means that by mid to late 2005, 2GB will be the norm, and that's pretty much the max for 32-bit chips without resorting to all kinds of ugliness. Sure, you can still address 4GB of memory with a 32-bit chip, but that's your virtual address space. Having more than 2GB of memory on a 32-bit chip means that you need less virtual memory than physical memory, which is fine for a system like Linux, but not so good for BSD or Windows (due to differences in how they use virtual memory). You also start running into some issues of memory fragmentation. In short, a 64-bit processor becomes a real advantage any time you have 2GB of more memory, which as mentioned above, will likely become common place for new systems sometime in mid to late 2005.
So why move to 64-bit now if you don't need it for two years? Simple, software is much slower (and more expensive) to move to new architectures than hardware. AMD's 64-bit chips have been out for 6 months already, and they were at least 6 months late before that, yet we've only just recently started seeing the first versions of AMD64 Linux. WinXp for AMD64 still isn't year (won't be for 6+ months), and applications will take time after that. If you wait until the last minute to start shipping 64-bit chips, you won't have an operating system to use it for.
As for the Jurassic Park thing, even if I had the most powerful render farm in the world with nearly infinite resources, I still don't think that I would be making Jurassic Park. That sort of thing takes a bit more than just processing power!
If your filesystem only allocates 4 bytes to a timestamp, it's going to break in 2038, 64 bit cpu or not. Any file formats or structures that only allocate 4 bytes to a time value will have the same problem -- and there is a LOT of them out there. And to make matters worse, if you change the format to allocate 8 bytes to the timestamps, then it's almost certainly not going to be compatible with old software anymore.
Also, porting things to use 64 bit cpus rather than 32 bit cpus isn't particularly easy. Yes, you can run in `32 bit mode' and they'll work fine, but many (mostly C) programs work under the assumption that integers are 4 bytes and so are pointers. In a 64 bit cpu, running in a 64 bit mode, this is not true. This really isn't a big problem, however, as the AMD 64 bit cpus can and do emulate a 32 bit cpu as needed.
And we don't need 64 bit cpus to fix the problem anyways -- we could use 2 32 bit ints to store the time stamp if we wanted to. It's a bit more work, but it could certainly be done, even with 32 bit cpus.
The doubling every 18 months seems to apply to workstation memory just as much as it applies to CPU speed. This shouldn't be a surprise since more applications tend to depend on memory for speed than raw CPU cycles. After all, if a section of code/data needs to be swapped from disk back into memory, all a faster processor can do is more NOOPs or context switch to a different process. So, while around 1980 a nice home computer would need about 64k to be "beefed up," now that about 15 cycles of 18 month periods have passed we are seeing beefed up workstations having around 2GB of memory or 64k*2^15. Next cycle is 4GB which maxes out the address space for 32 bits. We nearing the point where "power" users will start expecting workstations with over 4GB of memory and that definately calls for phasing out 32 bits on the desktop/laptop.
yeah, i've got the AMD programming manuals buried here somewhere. in the 64-bit "long mode", 16-bit operations are illegal. however, it initializes in 16-bit mode, and all 16-bit instructions are valid instructions at that point.
16-bit instructions only become illegal in 64-bit "long mode." please make sure you remember to clarify that point in the future.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
"An HP Superdome with 64 Itaniums running Oracle 10g was the first ever system to do OVER 1 MILLION transactions per minute."
:)
And how much does that cost? As I said, the Opteron isn't designed to compete with the Itanium at this level. When you're looking for a comparison, you really need to look at the sub-$25,000 market to see where Opteron's upper-end target resides. Where Opteron will really shine is in the blade market. The low-power chips due out shortly are going to bring a whole new level of performance to these types of servers in areas where space is nearly as important as speed.
Show me how a 1 - 4 CPU Opteron looks in a price/performance ratio with a 1 - 4CPU Itanium box; that's where AMD's upper-end target market is. The large cluster deals we're seeing here and there are fun and nice press, but the sub-$25,000 server (reasonably high volume while maintaining an excellent profit margin) is really what AMD's shooting for. Breaking into this market will pave the way for higher end stuff around 2008 or so. Until that time, it's going to be Opteron (K8) and Opteronx2 (multi-core, K9) that power AMD's vision of the do-it-all chip.
This is really the market Intel would be throwing away if Xeon got 64-bit extensions. Intel wouldn't see any sales of sub-$25,000 servers using Itaniums simply because customers would use Opterons or Xeons. This becomes a problem because Intel's going to face massive competition above $25,000 or so, what with mutli-core Power5s from IBM (8 cores?!), Sparcs, etc. Don't forget that this is still fairly new territory for Intel as well. Itanium has only been sold for about 3 years now, which makes it barely an infant to an enterprise looking into $100,000 systems. The problem Intel faces is that Itanium would be left sandwiched between Xeons/Opterons and Sparcs/Power5s. Right now, Itanium has the entire 64-bit market to itself once you're under the cost for a Power4 or Sparc box. Intel's margins on these babies are its financial counterpoint to the P4 market, which has been massively discounted to compete with AMD.
By the way, I haven't looked just yet, but I'm guessing a SunFire 15k would most certainly "touch that right now". Though, for $6 million or so, one would certainly hope so. Aside from that, I'd bet real money that a nice little cluster of Opterons could also match/beat that mark, at probably less cost. I'm not saying that Itanium is scrap silicon, only that 10 years of joint research with HP plus billions of dollars spent yielded a large, hot Opteron with poor 32-bit performance.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."