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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
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.