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Will Intel Ship an x86-64bit Chip This Year?
Solid Paradox writes "According to The Register, American Technology Research predicts an x86-64-bit processor will 'soon' arrive from Intel and in another story, they also predict that Sun and IBM will be the major players in the future 64-bit boom. Meanwhile the Inquirer has a somewhat related article entitled Senior Intel PR man talks 64-bit extension talk, which follows their Pentium V will launch with 64-bit Windows Elements article that says that the chip is to be sampled internally this month."
No, It is a new arch (Intel Architexture, IA64) - That's one of the big deals about the AMD 64 bit chip, it is x86 compatible.
I think that Intel have some other tricks up their sleeve. See my journal for some screwy wishful thinking. What is cool about loads of on-chip NVRAM is that it opens up the possibility for Intel to ship an embedded operating system. The Wintel duopoly will reach new heights with DRM and Trusted Computing.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Turbos? Yes, they're around, and quite common too. Difference is, they're not pushed as some kind of macho add-on anymore; instead, the technology is mainly used to improve efficiency (by, among other things, improving accelleration so you can use a smaller, more efficient engine and retain the performance you want). And among small diesels (common in Europe), I'd say turbo diesels are a lot more common than the non-turbocharged variety.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
For you and I, JimBob and JoeBlow, a good fast 32-bit system will kick much 64-bit arse. At least until
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Linus Torvalds on 64bit desktops
Linus Torvalds on 64bit desktops
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Elaborating slightly on this, the Itanium is a "VLIW" chip, which is a wholly different way of doing computation compared to the more usual "superscalar" paradigm. That's why it wasn't compatible with the x86, that's why they targeted it at servers doing heavy computation etc. The AMD chip, on the other hand, can support x86 relatively easily by including a "morphing layer" (I think that's the name) which maps x86 instructions to the native instructions of the chip. So they're able to target desktops.
However consider this:
AMD has been shipping Opteron for nearly a year already, and ports of the main OSs (including Windows and Linux) have been done, with others already working in the lab. It also runs old 32-bit OSs with no change. It will run legacy x86 code at full speed along side new 64-bit code. It is more efficient in terms of useful work done per clock cycle compared to Pentium 4 and Xeon. It scales better in multi-way systems (very important in workstations and serves) : the logic is built in. Xeon does not have this (and plain P4 is limited to single-way). It has a built in memory controller. It has twice as many registers. It's very inexpensive. Go and look up your favourite component retailer right now and compare an Opteron to a Xeon (and even the "high-end" Pentium 4).
The only place AMD may have trouble selling is to the ignorant masses who buy on MHz (or GHz) from highstreet stores, and pay too much.
The corporate world is more clued-up, and so are the enthusiasts and power-users.
Even if AMD does not knock intel off of it's perch, there is a huge potential market for Opteron. Several major corporations are behind Opteron. They've committed to it. It's going to be big business. 2004 will see a radical change in the hardware business. I predict that in the second half of this year, people will laugh a 32-bit PeeCees. They will be obsolete and bargain-basement by then.
Stick Men
For you and I, JimBob and JoeBlow, a good fast 32-bit system will kick much 64-bit arse.
This isn't valid. x86-64 systems can run 32-bit apps at full speed, so they'd be kicking their own arse.
Also note that x86-64 corrects some of the weaknesses of the x86 architecture, so x86-64 apps are automatically faster. Counter-strike was 30% faster, clock-for-clock.
That's because a lot of these clock speed improvements are "marketing MIPS".
To speed a computer up, the best way is to look for what's slowing it down the most, and speed that up.
To sell more computers, the best way is to look for what's easiest to speed up, and advertise that as the big advantage.
It's actually possible for a clock speed improvement to be accompanied by other changes that slow down some programs. Intel hit that when the first generation XScale was used in the Pocket PC... the big bottleneck for video on the ARM chips used in the Pocket PC was memory bandwidth... they had 206 MHz processors and 100 MHz memory and people were trying to play videos from memory cards that were far slower than that. They sped up the ARM instruction set on the XScale by breaking the instructions up with a longer pipeline. What happened? Well, that longer pipeline actually increased the impact of the slower memory by increasing the impact of a "bubble in the pipeline" when it had to go to main memory instead of cache to load instructions or when a mispredicted branch forced it to discard partially completed instructions, and on some benchmarks the 400 MHz XScale was actually slower than the 206 MHz StrongARM... and some vendors actually ran the XScale at 200 or 300 MHz!
The second generation XScale's 200 MHz bus largely solved that... at the cost of having to use faster and more power-hungry RAM. Everything's a tradeoff.
So, if you have a computer with a 266 MHz memory bus... how much difference do you think you'll see going from a 700 MHz processor to a 1.4 GHz processor or even a 2.1 GHz one? Well, that depends on what you're processing! If your program and its data is small enough to mostly fit in the cache, you'll get a big boost. If you're playing a videogame with megabytes of graphics being shoved down the AGP port to the video card, probably not a whole lot... save your money and upgrade the graphics card instead.
And that's why memory chips keep changing, they keep coming up with faster and faster memory... but that's falling further and further behind the marketing MIPS because there's a lot fewer tricks left to pull to market those numbers up.
uh.. you might want to stick to talking about computers. because im not sure you know wtf you're talking about when it comes to cars.
let me give you some basics:
an engine is an air pump. the more air you send through it in unit time, the more power it makes.
a great way to get more air into an engine is with forced induction. turbocharging is one route to acheive forced induction.
where are the turbo cars indeed ?
- subaru WRX
- lancer evo 8
- Audi RS6
- Dodge SRT-4
- Porsche 996TT
these are some of the fastest cars you can buy, each in their own respective price bracket.
there were some early reliability concerns with turbocharging because people forgot that americans are stupid and do things like not change their oil or keep running the car even though its obviously over heating. this would often lead to oil coking in the turbine and eventual bearing failure, causing turbos to wear out.
incidentally, replacing a turbine is a pretty common modification, and an easy way to extract more power from an engine (when part of a well thought out systems engineering approach that has the appropriate modifiactinos in inductino and exhaust to support the new turbine and keep it in its ideal efficiency range for the cfm/boost desired)
so, turbo charging is alive and well, some of the worlds most exciting cars are benefitting from it.
but some of the worlds most mundane, reliable cars are as well. turbo deisel engines are incredibly common and reliable in the fleet industry. ford has some 7+ liters turbo deisel truck motors that go hundreds of thousands of miles with only regular maintenance. and turbo diesel cars are huge in europe where diesel is cheaper and more energy efficient (and cleaner) then it is here... VW is introducing more TDI engined models this year infact. many of them make twice as much peak torque as naturally aspirated motors with similar displacement.
high RPM engines are also wildly successful in racing. They DO give the best performance. It's easy to see why:
SAE horsepower = (Torque (ft/lbs) * RPM) / 5252
in other words, the more revs you make, the more horsepower you'll produce. As long as your rpms are climbing faster than the non-constant torque curve is decreasing, you want to continue to rev higher.
This is why the BMW-Williams P82 Formula 1 motor redlines at slightly north if 19,000 RPM. It's a 3 liter V10 naturally aspirated motor making in excess of 900 horsepower. It isn't making as much torque but doesn't need to - only about 280ft/lbs or so.. because the car its installed in weighs bout 1000lbs. High-RPM high horsepower cars are the most performant in typical tarmac racing because you can take advantage of aggressive, torque multiplying gear ratios.
Incidentally, thats still more torque than most of the motors driving 3000+ lb street cars are producing.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
...the only two major computer system manufacturers who have elected to rely upon the Itanium are HP and SGI.
HP is manufacturing a number of different Itanium systems and winning performance awards with them. The largest is the "Superdome" which I believe will hold 64 CPUs. The Superdome is interesting in that it can accept either the old (soon to be discontinued) PA-RISC processors or the newer Itanium chips (hopefully Sun will do something similar with Sparc and Opteron in a revision of the e10k line).
SGI also makes a Linux Itanium NUMA supercomputer called "Altix" that is far more scalable than Superdome.
Both of these companies are going to be royally shafted if Intel produces a chip using the Opteron/Athlon64 instruction set. Intel has been incredibly unwise in not dropping the cost of the Itanium below the Opteron. Itanium has flaws, but it does have some incredible floating point performance.
HP is probably of the greatest concern. They ported their enterprise UNIX (HP-UX) to Itanium some time ago, and they are nearing a stable port of the OpenVMS operating system to Itanium. These operating systems have large, dedicated followings and they are technically quite advanced (far more so than Linux in many respects).
If the Itanium fails, it will be a bloodbath for HP enterprise systems.
Don't be ridiculous. The main advantages of 64-bit architecture is memory addressability and large-number computation. There are many applications for this; just because Granny doesn't want to do anything besides send email is irrelevant to the rest of us that do have uses for this power.
Some examples, some of which have already been pointed out:
1) video editing. Digital video takes up tons of space, and 2GB of memory addressability just doesn't cut it when you're trying to edit something that takes tens of gigs or more.
2) large-number computation. Scientific simulations, video rendering, etc. do tons of computation, and doing it 64 bits at a time will improve performance greatly.
3) games. The way games operate isn't too different than the rendering that Hollywood studios do in massive quantities, and games need to do it in real-time.
4) computation using large data sets. Simulators of all kinds (used for designing semiconductors, aircraft, automobiles, etc.) work with massive amounts of data. 2GB of memory addressability isn't enough.
Whether you think "most people" need 64 bits or not is irrelevant. I really don't care about the masses of AOL users who just read their email; in my line of work, 64 bit systems will soon probide a very noticable benefit as the simulators we're currently using are pushing the limits of 32-bit memory addressability and will soon need more. Given that there's thousands of engineers here in my company alone, and untold hundreds of thousands more involved in other types of simulation, is alone enough of a market opportunity for these CPU manufacturers to be pushing this technology. As for the home users, I'm sure the game writers will come up with ways to use that power too.