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."

Comments

Windows XP 64-bit

[Zog The Undeniable]

But will MS write their 64-bit XP to work on Athlon 64 and the new Intel chip, or will we have three different versions (Itanium, Athlon 64 and Intel x86-64)? At this rate Windows will become as fragmented as Linux ;-)

just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Great just what we need. another patch on a 20+ year old design. its not Apple who needs to switch platform's its us the whole x86 platform should be dropped. Apple has been able to pull off a proccessor change from the m68k to the PPC and they were able to mantain compatibly with legacy apps in emulation.

Did I Miss Something?

[los furtive]

...they also predict that Sun and IBM will be the major players in the future 64-bit boom

Isn't IBM already a major player?

Re:Dumb question

[argent]

In theory, 64bit should be better than 32bit (that goes without saying).

Not actually true. The larger the word size, the more bits you have to move on every operation. Going to a larger word size is normally driven by application requirements: if an application doesn't need a larger address space or a wider ALU a larger word can actualy make it slower.

What can you do with a 64-bit processor?

Well, one thing you can do is directly address every byte on the largest disk drives we can get today. With an operating system that was designed for direct access, like Multics, you would never have to "read" any files: when you opened one, it would look just as if it had already been read in... all your physical memory would effectively be a big disk cache.

For another, you can give each computer on the network part of the address space, so the same thing would be true for any file on your local LAN. Or any program on your LAN... no more messing around with protocols and remote file servers and databases... if you had the access rights, it would be as if they were local files.

You could do the same thing for each instance of a program, so you wouldn't need complex mapping code when passing messages from one program to another... in fact you could just pass the address of a message and let the memory management system move it over when you actually need it. That would get rid of a LOT of redundant copying, since you probably don't need all parts of every message.

The problem is, you'd need a whole new OS (or a whole old one... Multics is older than UNIX) to really take advantage of this kind of thing.

Re:Very Likely

[The One KEA]

It took 11 years for 32bit operating systems to finally displace 16bit operating systems. Your prediction of 32bit PCs being laughed at by December 2004 is probably a little too radical.

However, your other comments about AMD and the Opteron are spot on, IMO - the enterprise world is NOT going to buy a competing, slightly incompatible 64bit platform when it has already invested in another 64bit platform that is ALREADY AVAILABLE and is KNOWN to be just as fast/faster than a 32bit commodity platform or an older 64bit platform like a PPC box from IBM. It's hard enough these days for IT departments to support the current heterogenous mix of 32bit commodity desktops and servers and the old/new 64bit platforms from AMD and IBM. Throwing in a third which could cost even more and add more headaches would be pretty hard to sell, IMHO.

You were also right about marketing; AMD abolsutely MUST find a way to conclusively show that GHz != Speed. They need a new aggressive marketing campaign ASAP - unless the rumours about Prescott being a bit of a dud are true.....

Either way, AMD knows that they're sitting on a goldmine; they just need to exploit it as much as they can.