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Emachines 64-bit Athlons Now On Sale
tomhudson writes "According to zdnet,
emachines, the company geeks like to make fun of, finally has a toy we'd all like to get for Xmas -- an Athlon64 on the cheap :-)"
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It seems odd to me that if you were the first company to release an lower-end 64 bit processor you'd be "quiet" about it. Does this hint at the possibility that they're not very proud of this system? If I were a company that produced the first lower-end computer flaunting a 64 bit processor, I'd be screaming at the top of my lungs to get people to take notice.
Maybe it's just me...
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Microsoft, which released a beta version of the 64-bit Windows XP for Athlon 64 in September, has promised to ship the final version of the operating system in the first quarter of 2004. AMD has said several other companies are developing 64-bit games and other applications for its chip as well.
Of course Linux has been able to run on 64-bit platforms for quite some time now. If the Linux community _really_ wants to invade the desktop space, we need some killer games. Games have always been the reason why people spend way too much for a new PC. It's not what the public needs, it's what they want, and games help justify the expense.
This post may seem a bit off-topic, but I though the quote from the article which mentions Windows 64 and games in the same breath was worth pointing out.
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Who is the market for this? If you're one of the few people who has a genuine need for a 64 bit desktop, I can't imagine eMachines' entry is going to satisfy your requirements either. On the other hand, if your concern is that going to 64 bits is going to make your, err, bits twice as large, it seems to me that the bragging rights of a 64 bit Athlon and the shame of being an eMachines owner will cancel out.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
In fact, I bet MS insists on it. Let's say I make a system, and I saturation bomb TV with ads for my 64-bit system. Consumers ask, 'what can I run on it to take advantage of the capability?' I respond with 'Windows, eventually,' at which point consumers say 'OK, I'll buy it eventually, if I remember.' Right, that works. Otherwise, I can respond 'You can run linux on it! 64-bit happy!' and MS gets super-pissed and screws me next time my OEM contract is up.
So there's your problem. If I hype my chip, I have to hype Linux or something like that. Or I can wait for MS to catch up and hype it then, which makes more sense for my company.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The mainstream media does tend to figure that consumer = Microsoft Windows. I don't know about you, but I'd sure as hell consider Mandrake Linux to be a "consumer" operating system. It's clearly not targeting business users the way that SuSE and Red Hat are, nor is it really a hobbyist OS like Gentoo (not that Gentoo is strictly useful for a hobby, just that the target market is for people who like to tweak their system a lot rather than the "turn it on and go" crowd). I don't know what that leaves other than it being a consumer operating system.
As for OS X, it definitely isn't a 64-bit operating system. Even the new 10.3 "Panther" version is no more a 64-bit operating system than Win3.1 was a 32-bit operating system. There are a few 64-bit elements (and probably sufficient for most Mac users for the time being), but it's still almost exclusively a 32-bit operating system. WinXP 64-bit for AMD64 will be a full-fledged 64-bit operating system from the ground up. This, unfortunately, means that it needs new drivers, which might be a bit of a problem early on.
Sure you can write 64-bit applications for OS X, just like you could write 32-bit applications for Win3.1, but that hardly qualifies it as a 64-bit operating system!
All of the core operating system code is still 32-bit. OS X does NOT give you a flat 64-bit memory space, which is the most obvious sign that it's not a true 64-bit operating system. The kernel, the drivers and just about all of the core operating system is still a plain old 32-bit setup. They did include a few hacks to access more than 4GB of physical memory, but Intel proved that you can do that on a 32-bit processor years ago. The PPro and all follow-up x86 chips can support up to 64GB of physical memory. Like OS X, it does so through the use of ugly hacks.
Apple does also provide some 64-bit math libraries, which make use of the 64-bit integer registers. Nice, but not particularly important. It's fairly rare for most applications to need integers with more range than the 4 billion provided by 32-bit ints. However, when they are needed, being able to use native 64-bit integers is a big bonus. You can hack 64-bit integers together using two 32-bit integers, but that takes at least 3 times as long as with a proper 64-bit int.
As for Longhorn, I don't really know why you're bringing that up, it's years off and has absolutely nothing to do with the current discussion. WinXP 64-bit edition is just that, the 64-bit version of WinXP, no connection to Longhorn at all except that it comes from the same company. It's available now for the Itanium and scheduled for Q3 of 2004 for AMD64. This will be a true 64-bit operating system, providing a flat 64-bit address space with no ugly hacks or tricks. The kernel will be compiled in 64-bit mode, the memory manager will deal out address space using 64-bit pointers, and if your application wants to allocate 20GB of memory, you'll get it (assuming you've got sufficient physical + virtual memory).