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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."
Can it do hardware 32bit as well? Currently the Intel Itanium 64 bit chip has to emulate 32bit for applications that are not 64bit compliant, and therefore the AMD64 which can do hardware 64 and 32 bit sweeps the floor.
Plus, who is ready to receive 64 bit chips? Windows isn't quite yet there with their 64 bit OS, and many linux distros only have beta quality 64 bit OS'es.
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Ok, flame me if you wish, here's my dumb question:
If I got a computer with a 64 bit processor, what difference would I notice compared to a non-64 bit resaonbly high-end PC? I mean, would it just be a bit faster? Or a hell of a lot faster? Or just faster at certain things? Or would it not make much difference at all for normal everyday office tasks and playing games etc.?
The rumour is that Microsoft said a firm no to Intel requesting support for an entirely new 64-bit variation, but they worked out a deal where Microsoft would delay their x86-64 version of Windows until Intel was able to develop a compatible processor. The Intel x86-64 processor might even contain a few extra instructions that AMD doesn't have, just to ensure incompatibility.
These kinds of rumours may not not have anything to do with reality, but at least they can explain why Microsoft has not released the x86-64 Windows for sale even though there have been fully functional betas available for almost a year now.
Is this the beginning of a Linux+AMD vs. Windows+Intel battle?
I don't believe Intel could bring themselves to adopt an AMD design. It is known that Intel was working on an Itanium-Pentium hybrid that failed due to development complexities. By going with the "add-in module" (like the "Numeric coprocessor" before it) they can still push forward with their original plan in a slightly different way.
For the moment, there are more tools and a slightly more mature development environment for IA-64 versus x86-64. But x86-64 adoption will come for free, whereas its going to be like pulling teeth even with this "module add-in" solution. On the technical side, things look grim for Intel, however, Intel is too resourceful a company to bet against.
The picture will be clearer 12 months from now -- it will be a Pentium V + an Itanium add on versus Opteron or Athlon FX. Intel's got to try to bank on outperforming AMD (no easy feet as the benchmarks on Opteron and Athlon FX demonstrate), otherwise their more expensive solution with be DOA.
Do you mean AMD64? Will the Intel chips really be fully compatible with an AMD-designed instruction set?
If this happens, it will only reinforce the fact that Intel has lost it's leadership position in the x86 compatible market. It will also severely impact any eventual large scale adoption of Itanium.
AMD just needs to bite the bullet and actually do some marketing. It has clearly superior products at this point. The Athlon 64 3000+ looks like a great buy, and a nice way to check out 64 bit computing at a low price point. If you have the money laying around, though, you really can't beat the PowerMac G5s. :-)
BTW, it's also too bad that Microsoft has delayed 64-bit Windows. It shows all too clearly that the "Wintel" partnership is alive, well, and smelly. On the other hand, it does provide a nice platform for Linux to tout it's superiority - "What's taking so long Microsoft, we've had an AMD64 version of Linux for months already!". So much for the "advantages" of Microsoft's software development practices... :-P
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Guess the Rumours are True.
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So, you'll have a 64-bit module sitting on top of your 32-bit CPU?
I've been speculating (here and elsewhere) that this stackable thing is not going to be Intel's next big thing. I believe that the stacked module will simply contain NVRAM and not a 64-bit coprocessor. Why NVRAM? Well, it opens up some interesting possibilities. For example, if you had enough NVRAM on-chip (or reasonably close in terms of latentcy and bandwidth), you could simply shut down portions of the processor on-the-fly to save power. You could also stick the entire operating system on the stuff. The possibilities are amazing. If you haven't looked already, see my journal for much information on the subject as it relates to Intel.
Of recent interest are some presentations by Intel on NVRAM. Of interest is that they've announced that they've found that OUM will take them beyond transistors in one presentation while another presentation actually shows a transistorless cell that is quite simple (two electrodes and a programming material sandwiched in between).
A transistorless storage device could be the piece that stacks onto the P5.
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No they will not.
Intel likes to keep its architectures separated. They have Pentiums/Xeons for 32bit and Itaniums for 6bit processing. Releasing a x86-64 CPU will kill the Itanium plain and simple.
architectures be compatible? If they aren't, that could be quite a hassle
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The big problem with the Pentium isn't that it's only 32 bits wide, it's that the instruction set is so poorly designed. It's complex and hard to execute quickly, doesn't have enough registers, REALLY doesn't have enough floating point registers, has too high a cost to transferring data between the CPU and FPU, and huge chunks of silicon have to be used to cover for these faults.
Intel has tried to patch this with extended instruction sets before, like MMX, but they haven't been able to discard the legacy design. The last big improvement in their architecture was when they went from the 286 to the 386, and were able (eventually) to shed the overhead of 16-bit segments. Mostly... and they did that by making it a completely different mode instread of a patch on the existing instruction set the way the 8086-80286 transition was.
If their new "extensions" have a better instruction set, they will be able to perform the same kind of break without losing their existing user base. They tried to do this with IA64, but the processor was too slow and the IA32 "mode" was WAY too slow. It remains to be seen whether the new chip does a better job.
If they had been smart, they'd have kept the Alpha EV8 team intact after they bought them from the Compaq fire sale, renamed it the "IAXP", and shipped it with a hardware IA32-Alpha recompiler for legacy support.
Does anybody know if the extensive cross-licensing agreements that exist between AMD & Intel cover the x86-64 additions?
Would that not be the cats meow if Intel had to pay AMD royalties for each chip they sold?
AMD fan or Intel fan; we are damn lucky that there is competition.
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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
This is only correct if you consider microcode to be the "native instructions" on AMD. Itanic introduced a whole new ISA, which I guess requires some kind of 'morphing to support x86. Opteron uses the existing x86 ISA with a small number of 64-bit extensions. So, x86 is the "native instruction" set for the AMD CPUs, which allows for much better performance of current 32-bit applications.
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That's an important point that people need to keep in mind. The 64-bitness in itself provides just about zero benefit to 99.9% of users.
Many people fail to realize that 64-bit in this context only means 64-bit pointers. Apps have been using 64-bit data for years: 80-bit floating point has been implemented in the X86 since the 1980s, and apps have been able to process 128 bits of fixed-point data at a time since the MMX was introduced in the late 1990s.
Even in a 64-bit CPU, most ints will probably be compiled at 32 bits to save memory space. There are very few situations where you need a 64-bit integer value in real world programs. You will not see any speedup due to suddenly being able to do arithmetic on bigger numbers.
The only "big deal" about 64-bit processors is the 64-bit addressing logic. This eliminates the 4GB limit on a contiguous virtual memory space. While this may be valuable for people running huge databases and scientific simulations, the individual user today has no need for this. The only big piles of data the average user may have today are videos, and algorithms to process video are highly streamable. There's no need to map an entire video into memory at one time.
64-bit pointers bring the disadvantage of consuming more valuable cache real-estate and bus bandwidth for every operation. These resources aren't free, and the extra cache and bandwidth added to support 64-bit pointers in a 64-bit CPU could have been utilized in a 32-bit processor to improve its performance as well.
AMD has indeed apparently produced a CPU that's faster on the average users' tasks, but as was pointed out, that's largely due to adding more register space to reduce the x86's notorious register pressure problem. AMD could have acheived the same effect by adding more registers and keeping the CPU 32 bits. I'm not saying that such a move would make any sense; it wouldn't (in particular, it would be a marketing disaster). I'm just pointing out that that's the only feature the vast majority of users will actually benefit from in the next 5 years with this CPU.
All of the posts I've read only talk CPUs. Hasn't anyone noticed that MS now (quietly) has a multi-platform software virtual machine? .NET strives from cross-platform compatibility, just as Java did years, and years ago.
MS realised this IA-32/IA-64 was going to happen, and .NET quietly solves the problem. MS is pushing people to migrate their IA-32/Win32 apps to it.
As a current .NET software engineer, the specific Windows platform becomes irrelevant.
You could easily argue that MS is delaying the 64-bit world to give developers more time to migrate to .NET.
Sean
I mean, of course it's a marketing ploy. It's also a direction to go for the future. At some point we want 64 bit chips, right? and some day, we will want 128 bit chips, right? and so on.. gotta change some time.
Second.. if you look at the benchmarks on amd-64 chips, you'll find that 1.8Ghz amd64 chips are equalling 3Ghz P4 chips, and that's on standard 32 bit code. Of course, that has nothing to do with being 64 bit, but with being re-architected.
The focus on 64 bit is markting one, for sure... but if you simply look at it as a more capable, better architected chip.... it makes sense.
Why does it need a killer app? It's an incremental upgrade that's no more expensive than the last incremental upgrade? It's pretty much a no-brainer for anyone who buys AMD, it's just as fast in 32bit code and 64bit code can be much faster on the right stuff (audio/video encoding, etc).
It's great that MS is delaying though. All the companies that make 3d modelling and rendering software and haven't already switched to Linux are doing so now. Ditto companies making scientific analysis software and other computationally intensive programs.
In letting Intel talk them into hindering AMD (or just being pathetic at bringing out a new OS version) Microsoft has just shot themselves in the foot.