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Intel Shifting 64-bit Plans
OS24Ever writes "News.com has an article stating that 'Intel plans to demonstrate a 64-bit revamp of its Xeon and Pentium processors in mid-February--an endorsement of a major rival's strategy and a troubling development for Intel's Itanium chip' Is this the end of Itanium?" Looks like the rumors were true.
Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.
For "potential Itanium customers".
But based on their sales figures, it looks like they really aren't any.
If they had their heads in the right places, they'd heavily go after CT.
is solaris ported to this baby and theres 64 bit goodness for everyone!!
Well we all saw this one coming with once we looked at the opteron.
(Really, it kicks serious bootay)
Until a 64-bit version of Windows comes out, I don't see this mattering all that much. 64-bit doesn't mean anything to the masses of end users, just the developers. I don't care if my computer is 2-bit or 1000-bit as long as it works well.
Intel has already publicly admitted to having X86 processors with 64 bit extension in development. Also, take a look at microsoft, who refer to X86-64 as "64 bit extended architecture."
Everybody and his brother figured out long ago that Itanium is not something that will penetrate effectively into the desktop market. It's hot, expensive, incompatible, etc. It requires a ton of work to get code running smoothly on Itanium. Th only amazing thing is how long it took intel to admit that it had egg on its face!
No, this does not signal that Itanium is doomed. Have a look at www.spec.org and look at the CPU2000 scores. Itanium is starting to kick some serious tail.
However Itanium is not a desktop chip-- its too big. 64-bit x86 will be a consumer product for desktops.
I'm afraid that we'll see Microsoft leave AMD waiting at the altar for the Win64 OS only for AMD to find out that MS has eloped with Intel for their 64 bit X86 variant.
I doubt that the US justice department and antitrust will have any bearing on such a move.
Anyone else?
I don't care if my computer is 2-bit or 1000-bit as long as it works well.
...1024* =P
While I would love to own one of these, unless Intel releases chips with CT (the 64-bit stuff) and not LT (LaGrande Technology - Palladium/TCPA "security" support), I will be sticking with what I have or buying a PowerPC (GNU/Linux either way). Hopefully LT will be optional like HyperThreading is now, but given that many of the "features" it enables require control of the majority of the market, I seriously doubt it.
Does anyone have any real reason to suspect that Intel will build CPUs that are completely compatible with AMD-64 architecture?
I am sure that AMD pays Intel for x86 and MMX/SSE licenses, just wondering if Intel will use the AMD design for the 64-bit extension. If so, I think we can all rest easy that AMD will be producing CPUs for a very long time, with all the benefits of competition for the consumer.
ps-- in case AMD is listening, I plan replacing my 1333 MHz T-bird/KT133A machine with an A64/socket 939 machine. Thanks for providing superior performance in the sub-US$200 CPU market for so long. As long as you continue to do so, you will always have a loyal fan base among us mere mortals.
He could have 1000 bit if he wanted to. be a real bitch to design the chip though... :)
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Same bullshit...different company..
Blah blah blah, 64-bit processor....billions of GB of ram....
The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?
I mean yeah it sucks to change ISA but this is what you do. Write a *free* backend to GCC for your ISA and have it merged into the tree. Then pay small group of Gentoo folk to create a port of Gentoo to your ISA.
Net result is a ISA everyone can develop for [re: audience] as well as an OS they can run on it...
Sure it would take time and money but in the end you don't make a bloatware cpu to run the hugeass x86 instructions with all the tacked on do-dahs...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
So the article doesn't really cover the issue I'm most curious about - are the x86-64 extensions (yamhill) compatable with AMD's Opteron or will they require different 64-bit binaries?
I love it when companies lie out their asses for months until they can flip their strategy around.
"Oh no, desktop users would never need 64 bit support! It's just not something a regular user ne-- CYKE! NOW HERE'S OUR LATEST AND GREATEST 64 BIT CHIP! PLEASE, NO CROWDING!"
It's been a long time.
Rose: I'll never let go Jack...
Jack: Are you smoking crack woman? I'm getting off this POS! You can stay with Craig!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is fantastic news. AMD 64's are outselling Itanics by a huge margin. CPU buyers are demonstrating quite clearly that they want a good migration path. Itanic was such an inferior design that Intel is now forced to build a chip that is compatible with AMD's instructions.
:)
This means that we now will have another generation of chips from Intel and AMD whose instruction sets are compatible with each other. Prices will remain reasonable because there is competition. And in the 64-bit world, computers will remain inexpensive -- unless you buy that OS and office suite that end up costing more than the hardware, but you wouldn't do that because you know better, right?
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It was made by hard drive manufacturers.
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Anyone else find any irony in the title? Intel shifting 64 bit plans?
http://siokaos.org/
I can't imagine Intel is even breaking even now on the Itanium on the production costs alone, let alone the outrageous amount of money spent with HP on what is looking to be a huge boondoggle. How much longer will Intel bother producing? What unfortunate quarter will see a writedown for all Itanium development costs?
Maybe this will help get MS off their asses to put out a 64 Bit OS for Non-Intel (i.e. x86-64) I have wondered why MS has drug itself so slow when they had an Itanium version some time ago soething contractual with Intel ?
:)
32 Bit vs 64 Bit MS operating systems , TWICE as many chances for bugs
No one ever got fired when going w/Big Blue
:)
.::. "Come close to me, Klingon, and let me die with my hands at your throat!" .::.
Check that...no one but a slew of Intel Engineers!
In most markets being twice as expensive for 25% more performance just will not cut it ...
all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use
That would be one sad little lab. At the time the 286 was around, there were plenty of (dozens in fact) of scientific computing architectures vastly more advanced than the 286. They cost quite a bit more, too.
It wasn't really until the Pentium Pro came around that the processor architecture in 'mainstream' PC computing had caught up to the big boys. Since then, intel and AMD have largely been driving the cutting edge. This drove alot of them out of business, but even today there are niche markets who need serious I/O performance that intel machines don't deliver.
-
This hunk of junk is what the Alpha was given the final axe to make way for, and it isn't even surviving.
Actually, 64-bit computing isn't any faster than 32-bit computing. This is a common mistake made due to the surface facts.
In reality, 64-bit computing is possibly -slower- than it's 32-bit counterpart due to the increased bandwidth required, though smart engineering in modern 64-bit CPU's tend to work around this.
The advantage to 64-bit computing is, frankly, in the memory space that can be addressed. When you can address larger amounts of memory, you can make an application faster as less disk paging is necessary (assuming you have the memory to match). A good example of this are database servers. When you have 24GB of memory and a 20GB database, you can literally buffer the database in memory, this removing your slower disks from the equation.
Mind, you can do this with PAE on Intel's current 32-bit offerings, but I digress.
Ultimately, I think what Intel is -really- doing here is playing catch up on a modern variation of the "mhz myth game". Intel always took the hearts and minds of the average user, as a 3ghz P4 seemed better than an AMD processor running at 2.2ghz or a PowerPC running at 1.25ghz... even if in some or many cases, the "slower" chips worked faster.
Now, the average user is seeing the G5 at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and the Athlon64 chips at 2ghz, but a whopping 64-bits... and they're assuming that they must be faster due to their deeper bit depth. This is really nothing new. Sony has been doing this with the PlayStation2 for a few years now... claiming it to be a 128-bit system when it's really just a MIPS chip with a 128-bit vector unit. On this line of thinking the G4 and G5 are -also- 128-bit chips... but Apple just doesn't market them as such.
Intel had to act to counter this assumption, and the easiest way is to add 64-bit extensions to the P4, keep them clocked higher, and then win both of the wars.
Does the average user need 64-bit? No. Does the user who does know where to get it already? Yep. Sun, Apple, AMD, HP and even Intel's Itanium have been offering 64-bit technology for a while now.
This all comes down to marketing. That's it, that's all.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
The basic Itanium architecture has been around for something like 5 years now, hasn't it? And still nobody has managed to write a decent compiler for it. Sure, on paper it might be a very fast architecture, but if no one is able to actually take advantage of it's potential benefits, what good is it?
hey, who moved my paneer?
Forgive me if I get a little bored by this 'revelation', I wrote about it in September:
:) )
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668
And I followed it up a week later with this:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11781
Ok, people seem to not taken me seriously then, so I'll reiterate. Prescott has 64 bit extensions built in. They use the AMD64 instruction set. This is because MS twisted their arm into it.
The question of when they turn it on is more a political one than a technical one, and that I don't know the answer to right now, most likely because Intel does not know either. They are in one hell of a bind. If Prescott is 64 bit, why should I pay 5x as much for an Itanic again? Oh yeah, a marginal performance gain on FP code, but a loss on Int. Whoopty-#&%^#-ding-dong.
It will be announced at IDF, count on that. When you can buy it, good question. My guess is that it will be an inticement for the first Prescott/EE buyers.
-Charlie
(As a self-plug, if you read the Inq, you would know these things
Nuff Said.
modeling is a hard job
....hairspray, tight and ill fitting skirts and tops. Thongs riding up your ass crack. Other bitches using your makeup. Younger women grabbing the spotlight. Bikini waxing...all those super hot stage lights. Watered down gatoraid....getting hit on by every foley pusher on the lot. Larger and larger breasts!! It's hell...got it?
Just try it sometime and see for yourself. No picnic!!!
What differentiates Itanium2 from any Xeon is not the register width, but is the combintion the revoluationary EPIC architecture and auto parallelizing compilers.
IA64 can speed through tasks that deal with 32-bit numbers and 32-bit addresses with great efficiency, and it will beat a similarly clocked Xeon hands down running native compiled code.
Xeon + 64-bit registers is no threat to Itanium except in the minds of simpletons who look at the marketing bullets and say "gee, 64 sure is a big number!"
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Itanium is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Itanium
community when IDC confirmed that Itanium market share has dropped yet
again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all
servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly
states that Itanium has lost more market share, this news serves to
reinforce what we've known all along. Itanium is collapsing in
complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last
[samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Itanium's
future. The hand writing is on the wall: Itanium faces a bleak
future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Itanium because
Itanium is dying. Things are looking very bad for Itanium. As many of
us are already aware, Itanium continues to lose market share. Red ink
flows like a river of blood.
Itanium 1 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its
core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time
Itanium 1 developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to
underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt:
Itanium 1 is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of Hewlett-Packard, abysmal sales and so on,
Itanium1 went out of business and was taken over by Itanium 2 who sell
another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to
yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Itanium has steadily declined in market
share. Itanium is very sick and its long term survival prospects are
very dim. If Itanium is to survive at all it will be among OS
dilettante dabblers. Itanium continues to decay. Nothing short of a
miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical
purposes, Itanium is dead.
Fact: Itanium is dying
If Intel would just price the Itaniums in the same ballpark as the AMD-64s, they wouldn't need to do this crap. If they want Itanium to have widespread acceptance, do what they did with x86 to ensure widespread acceptance -- make it CHEAP!!!
For servers, addressing with more than 32 bits is crucial these days. The question is - how do you get performance improvement on a desktop ?
... well, it has 128 registers.
The real performance gain is in the change of ISA (instruction set architecture). True, calling it 64-bit vs. 32-bit is pretty much a marketing paint. The real issue with x86 is not even the fact that it's CISC - it's the number of registers. Few general-purpose registers means that you have to go to memory A LOT. x86 has 8 GPRs - the compiler can barely allocate 2 or (at most) 3 of them to variables.
It's much easier these to make register operations fast than memory ones. The x86-64 has 16 GPRs - you can actually do some useful register allocation with them and reduce the memory traffic. Itanium
That's why you get performance improvement just by recompiling an app that doesn't even use "long longs" to "64 bits".
The Raven
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Itanium's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Itanium faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Itanium because Itanium is dying. Things are looking very bad for Itanium. As many of us are already aware, Itanium continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Itanium is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its engineers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Itanium developers Mike Hubbard and Jordan Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Itanium is dying.
All major surveys show that Itanium has steadily declined in market share. Itanium is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Itanium is to survive at all it will be among processor dilettante dabblers. Itanium continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Itanium is dead.
Fact: Itanium is dying
Now there's a really dumb statement. If Pentium64 provides Itantium performance at a lower price with Microsoft software support -- then switch! It ain't that hard a decision. You're not losing anything here.
And if P64 doesn't play well in multi-processing systems, then Itantium can continue to fight it out against AMD.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You understand that double precision floating point is 64 bits, right? And the grandparent post didn't mention anything about integers, right? I really don't see what the BS is that you're talking about.
It doesn't matter if Itantium is better than AMD64, or Prescot64, or you name it -64. Alpha was better still, and it died. Itantium will die too because the other chips are good enough, and much cheaper. Intel will have to compete on price with AMD64, which makes Itantium a dead end.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Prescott comes out Monday with no mention of 64-bit.
Sorry. There may be a few AMD64 things in there, but not most of them. Prescott is 32-bit.
Surprisingly, the increasing heavy use of multimedia on home computers is a GREAT reason why 64-bit X86-64 CPU-based systems could have a surprisingly big impact on home computing.
32-bit computing today maybe fine for business tasks and surfing the Internet, but when you start doing things like processing images from digital still cameras (especially now with increasing file sizes from digital still cameras that have five megapixel or higher resolution sensors) or downloading movies from your MiniDV/MicroDV digital camcorder to be edited and processed, these tend to put a massive premium on both processing power and system RAM needs.
Besides, with x86-64-based CPU's, you can partially or fully recompile your current x86-based program code to 64-bit operations. This is not true with Itanium-based systems, which has to be coded from almost literal scratch to take full advantage of the Itanium's CPU registers.
I imagine this process is well underway, and nearing completions for the Solaris 10 release.
Meanwhile a port of HP-UX is imminent if the Itanium tanks. Take the x86 port effort + 64-bit clean IA64 version and mix together and you get the Opteron optimized version (well, it's a wee bit more complicated than that...)
So we'll have Darwin, *BSD, Linux, HP-UX (probably), Solaris, Windows NT 5.2, zow! All that's left is for Apple to port the GUI, and we'll have a cool platform for the future.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Actually 64-bit computing is not just about larger address widths but the fact that those CPUs also (usually) have 64-bit wide general/integer compute units. So a 64-bit CPU can actually run faster, sometime much faster, nearly 2x for 64-bit wide integer operations on average.
So in reality a 64-bit CPU can boost performance of many everyday operations (most file/IO systems use 64-bit offsets, system counters are often 64-bit, lots of data/stream processing task, etc.).
True the average user doesn't need 64-bit wide addressing (which Apple doesn't currently offer in Mac OS X) but they can use the performance boost that 64-bit general/integer operations can yield.
operate on 8-byte aligned IEEE floats and (at least) 80-bit wide FP registers?
And it's been that way since the 386?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Isnt that what Microsoft did with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95? -- took the 16-bit and 'mixed' with a 32-bit version? *shudder*
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
While AMD definitely did the right thing, and the Athlon64/Opteron is definitely the best solution for now, I hope the x86 architecture dies a permanent death soon. What we need is a 64-bit ARM ISA. The ARM2/3 (the first 32-bit desktop processors) had 36,000 transistors, a 3-stage pipeline, and were faster than 386 processors clocked 3x higher. Every instruction gets a 4-bit condition field, removing many branch instructions from the program. Parameters can be shifted transparently, with no additional overhead. Lots of useful addressing modes, and lots of general-purpose registers. Definitely the only ISA I can say it is actually a pleasure to write code for. Unfortunately Intel seems to be sitting on the XScale (ARM successor), and doing nothing much with it. I hope AMD picks up the "KISS" philosophy of the ARM -- with it, they could produce a bliningly fast processor with very little work.
Eee by gum you had it easy!
In my day we used a 4 bit 4004 processor, *and* had to pay our employers for priveledge of working.. 64 bit, pah!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
That's +1 Funny if I ever saw one. Of course, I'm a PC user so I can laugh at the fact the AMD and Intel are in such competition. Maybe Motorola will get back in the game and Mac users can be happy (heh) again.
The reason IA-64 is destined for the scrap heap is the price. Given that I do some memory-intensive things I wanted a 64-bit machine for my new server. I bought an amd64 box simply for one reason: cost!
amd64 is a clever extension of x86 and probably the biggest win are the new registers - that results in quite a performance boost. But IA-64 was just pretty damn cool.
I wish M$ didn't strongarm Intel. If the current headaches of the myDoom worm have taught us anything: architectural diversity is a good thing. I would rather there be 3 64-bit architectures out there (IA-64, amd64, and PPC64); heck bring back Alpha! It means that its one more stumbling block to writing virii.
FWIW, my amd64 box is fast and handles huge jobs easily. With a couple of gigs of swap thrown on it even my Lisp code runs fast (amazing).
Oh give it up! The "average user" may actually be "assuming" that the AMD64 and G5 platforms are faster because they took a look at some benchmarks, unlike some people who insist 64-bits will make no difference because of blablabla. Those people are just living a year in the past before the Opteron was released and the first reviews hit the net. We have AMD64 and PPC cpu's working at around 2Ghz beating anything Intel can offer at up to 3.2Ghz at almost anything. It's true that it doesn't really matter they're 64-bit, because that part of them isn't even supported yet. You can philosophize (is that a word in English?) all you like about trees not making a sound if nobody is there to hear it, but the fact is this CPU forrest happens to be crowded with millions of ears who are all hearing the sound of Itanium and P4 lumber crashing to make room for fresh AMD64 and PPC wood. And unlike the Mhz-myth, it's not just some cheap marketing trick.
See, hearing about things like this pisses me off.
... it's kind of depressing.
... it hasn't taken off. The real pisser, though, is to think that the dominant 64-bit architecture of the future might essentially be i386 with more and bigger registers. Hopefully at least IBM will step in with its POWER-based solutions. Man, if I ever get drunk and start bitter rants, I swear it'll be about processor architectures ...
When I think of all the nice system lines that have died off because their parent companies decided "Well, we could just have Intel make our 64-bit chips, and then make money selling systems", and all the technically nice architectures that are basically dead now because of decisions like that (MIPS, Alpha, et. al)
I mean, I wouldn't mind if Itanium had been more successful. It was actually neat to think of Digital's EV8 team building SMT technology into Itanium. (Is this the work that's been manifested as HT on P4 on Xeon-class machines?) Especially since EPIC is supposed to make things so much different. But
Remember Intel shouting to all and sundry about how cool RDRAM was?
Thank god that consumers had the intelligence to throw the shit back.
Anyways here is one company which doesn't learn from mistakes.
resurrect my
In general you are correct: 64-bit is slower than 32 bit except on tasks that use 64-bit integer arithmetic (>4GB address spaces/file systems, encryption/bignums). That said, code compiled to X86-64 is faster because the expanded instruction set (particularly the larger register set) allows for a number of additional processing optimizations.
Also all of the prior examples we have for a 32-bit->64-bit transition are for RISC architectures. The IA32->X86-64 code transition probably doesn't incur as significant a code size penalty since it has all those nice indexed addressing features, meaning that you don't have to specify full addresses or load full words all the time. So it won't take as big a hit as a pure RISC architecture during the transition.
The end result is that most applications gain from re-compilation to X86-64 native code for a given Opteron/Athlon64 processor and clock speed. So it's not just marketing, there's real numbers to back it up.
Disclosure: I own AMD stock.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Look at how many trouble Intel has trouble admitting they are wrong and following AMD on something. Intel is so used to AMD copycating them on everything, they don't seem to know how to deal with the shoe being on the other foot.
So far Intel has followed AMD onto DDR memory, after dragging their feet for a year. Now it's happening with 64 bits. Next expect to see it with integrated memory controller, desktop dynamic power management(like quick 'n cool) and hypertransport. I'm sure when they come around the technologies might be similar, but they'll have some other name for it. Hopefully, Intel doesn't try the old Microsoft embrace and extend.
People forget that Windows 2000 was available for the Alpha processor and was full 64-bit.
Good thing you're running Windows... :-)
Argh!
This is very bad news for a computing purist.
We get to live with the ugliest hack ever, for
yet another 20 years.
Please burn all CPU designs that contain the
A20 gate.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
So my post (the parent) has been rated down to "-1, Troll". Interesting.
Every point in my post was true: these 32/64-bit hybrid CPUs are only being produced because Windows' 64-bit performance sucks; Microsoft really did hold back the progress of the 386 by five years; in addition to hamstringing their CPU technology for the sake of Windows, Intel will continue to push the Itanium for the high end; and those high end machines will be running Linux.
It is an accurate assessment of what is happening in the industry, and it is a more truthful picture (one might say insightful) than is being hyped by Microsoft and this article's author, in other words, it puts things in proper perspective.
It also says things that Microsoft doesn't want people to hear. I assume this last point is why my post was rated down, to hide it from view.
It's not about if one chip is "better" than another (I assume you are referring to raw performance). One thing that keeps being repeated is that consumers want compatibility. They've built up a large software library and don't want to not be able to use it, and use it as fast or faster than their current systems (this leaves out x86 emulation of ia64 and alpha).
You must not be familiar with the x86-64 architecture. Simply recompiling your 32-bit app as 64-bit DOES increase performance. It has nothing to do with 64-bit vs 32-bit, it has to do with the fact that x86-64 provides more registers, and this itself increases performance.
"And most people are too stuck in the x86 mindset to even see it."
bullshit.
most people look at the $1400 price tag (for the cpu alone! not even including the motherboard and other hardware) with poor software support and say "fuck it".
if it were cheap and fast, people would buy it. itanic is neither.
Will Intel's extensions to the x86 architecture be compatible with AMD's. Or will fat binaries that can execute in x86, x86-64 Intel and x86-64 AMD be necessary?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Intel going to produce AMD clones? After Intel adapting AMD's favourite memory architecture (DDR instead of Rambus). Is AMD the new chip architecture leader? Will it be recognized as such?
64-bit computers are a huge step forward. As electronics get faster, we will see huge benefits in functionality and speed, especially for algorithms that use a lot of memory and use maps (in 64-bit, these maps can be expanded and be, for example, 10 GB without a problem).
Large memory will allow to completely disable the swap file and the virtual memory, which limits speeds quite a lot.
Finally, 64-bit opens really good possibilities for interactive games...games where each object in the game is not a flat texture, but a fully interactive object.
A silly detail that means we'll be stuck with x86 compilers longer. I would much rather the development be put into a compiler that will eventually pave the way for new and interesting things. X86 is holding us back in this respect.
I don't think Sun follows Microsofts examples.
Look at the history of 32 -> 64bit Ultrasparc
Solaris and it dosn't resemble MS practices at all.
Nice to see that soon Itanic/Unobtanium will leave nothing but an oil slick.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Wether they be Itanium or Xeon rely rely on mostly on the external chipset to make the sytem scale anyway ... IBM's 64x setup can take either Xeons or Itaniums.
If you are looking for the processor which needs minimum amount of glue-logic to scale you will have to go for Opteron (EV8 woulda been good too).
C'mon all you "alpha geeks" (snort) time to buy the better technology that's available now...AMD!
The Athlon 64s and Opterons are faster at much lower clockspeed, and run Linux really well! :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I don't know, selling Itaniums at barebone prices seems almost like a reasonable gamble rather than throwing all of the development costs into the shitter. I really wonder which is cheaper.
Even a drug dealer is smart enough to give a little taste just to spread the word. No one wants to shell out that type of cash on something that is unproven, and even less want to develop software for it.
I liked the concept of Itanium. At least Intel was bold enough to try something new. They just wouldn't risk enough to make a serious play. Changing ISA is a bet the farm type of proposition, and Intel lost its nerve.
Imagine if Opeteron had bombed. AMD would have to play second fiddle to Intel for several years. Itanium might have had a chance to get all the costs back, and we'd still be talking about the Mhz wars. Or if there was no Opeteron; same senario.
AMD was will to take huge risk. If they sold the Opetron at half what the Itanium sold at, I doubt MS would even talk them about getting a special port of an OS for their chip. AMD sold it at a price where no one _could_ ignore them. I doubt the backwards compatibility would have mattered that much at the current price. As it is, we won't see the full benifits of the chip for several years, and most people will update their software just to take full advantage of the 64-bit design. Software makers rejoice ("It's COBAL... 64!"), straglers move in line as they can't run any of the new fancy programs, and this could have easily been Itanium instead of Opteron.
It would be RISC/EPIC that is known for hugeass instructions. x86 was specifically designed for instruction set compactness.
You are moron.
No. HP has a market cap of about $76 billion. IBM is valued at about $150 billion.
Intel seem to have already put necesary element in the prescott die to enable 64-bit computing when they want. At chip-architect they have an article with explaination of the prescott die.
You (or Intel) presume that the market is happy to be segmented by Intel.
The real problem for big companies is when they begin to pay more attention to their own strategies than they do to the market. IMHO, customers don't like markets to be segmented. As often as not, market segmentation is a tool for producers to inflate prices and profits in one "segment" while responding to competitive price pressure in another segment. In other words, sell the Celerons dirt-cheap to compete with AMD, while making higher profits on P4 and astronomical profits on Xeon because AMD doesn't have brand-penetration into those spaces.
Market segmentation is bad for gearheads like us, because it puts awkward gear-shift points into the price-performance curve. With the release of Opteron, AMD has at least made it out of the Celeron space, and may be encroaching into the Xeon space. AMD may have some segmentation with the Duron/Athlon/K8 stuff, and they have a confusing set of K8 offerings, but it's less rigid and easier to bridge than Intel's.
Incidentally, according to some Usenet sources, once upon a time, Intel planned for X86 to have withered in favor of IA-64-everywhere by around 2005.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Is it illegal for Intel to sell the Itanium for $200 instead of $20,000? I don't know the exact volume prices for the IA-64 chips but I do know they are not price/performance competitive with x86 and x86-64 chips.
Microsoft is able to sell X-boxes at a loss to gain a toehold in a market...why can't Intel who haven't been ruled a monopoly!
Simple answer: Greedy idiots...
Now they can wear a multi-billion dollar R&D, manufacturing & marketing mistake like a badge of shit!
You gotta give AMD lots of props on this, if the Adopteron and Athlon64 didn't go off as it has this would never have happened and an entire industry may have been forced to massively overhaul their systems.
Of course Intel's bad approach to the Itanium didn't help. I understand through the grape vine that Intel chip guys wouldn't listen to the DEC chip guys - the same guys that came up with the far superior Alpha chip. Oh well. I bet I'll retire (20 years or less I hope) before the X86 is finally killed.... 100 years later - still using the X86 based stuff.
Mods are fucking brilliant to score a post marked "OT" as Offtopic. Hey, bitch, does that work for "Insightful"?
The parent post is insightful. For some operations 64-bit computing can even be four times faster. As GMP developers write in Is 32 bits really better than 64?, ``If we instead would compare an Athlon XP and an Athlon 64, the latter would be almost 4 times faster. Why 4 times and not just 2 times? Because a 64x64=>128 bit integer multiplication actually performs 4 times more work than a 32x32=>64 bit integer multiplication!''
Is that the Merced core (Itanium) has only a 64 bit data bus, where AMD's Opteron has a 144 bit bus.
Intel's problem is that too much of their market is tied up in legacy 16 and 32 bit apps. AMD doesn't have this problem - they started off with a RISC core which broke down the x86 instruction set into micro ops on the fly - and these executed faster.
And once again, Intel is making the same mistake they made with the 286 - a 32 bit processor with a _24_ bit memory bus. Intel has consistently under-cached and under-bussed its processors. AMD's 144 bit bus on the Opteron doubles the processor's effective throughput.
Since DMA, processors have had to share the memory bus with PCI and other IO devices. Which means that something like a hard drive or ethernet card can effectively "steal" bus cycles from the CPU, resulting in stalling instruction execution while a physical device is doing IO.
Core designers have just about reached the theoretical limit when in comes to instruction execution efficiency. It just isn't possible to execute more than one instruction per clock cycle without adding parallel instruction units. Even then, interdependencies between instructions can slow the actual throughput down to the 1 per clock cycle level. Because of this, the bus throughput is now the largest factor when determining processor speed. And Intel, true to their tradition, has designed their Itanium with a 64 bit data bus - a design which simply isn't adequate for the high end systems for which the processor is marketed. The uses for a 64 bit architecture require both high instruction throughput and large IO capacity.
The only architecture in which an Itanium would do well is the IBM mainframe architecture in which IO units and processors do not share a common memory bus.
* - I know the McKinley core has a 128 bit data bus, but it seems to me more of a case of "too little, too late". And this isn't even taking into account that the _other_ 64 bit platform, SPARC, started off with a 16MB L2 cache (not 256kB as Itanium has!?).
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I don't want the voodoo or vudu of 32+32 or 32+64.
open4free
I seem to remember reading a comment by one of the HL2 developers that compiling it in 64 bit would mean they could make a much more impressive game.
I wonder what impact it would have on the desktop market if Valve took HL2 to AMD and said here bundle this "Linux 64bit edition of HL2" with your chips.
More usual software (take your web browser, or text editor, or Unix kernel) is going to do thousands of pointer operations for each file pointer calculation it performs. If you have 4 GB or less of RAM, that's a lot of zero bytes filling your caches and RAM and going through your system bus.
32 bits: 1000 fast operations + 10 slow operations.
64 bits: 1000 slow operations + 10 fast operations.
I couldn't tell from the article- is this going to be a left shift or right shift? Inquiring minds want to know to what power of 2 Intel is going to screw up :)
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Better than what is currently available but not backwards compatible. Intel will not make the same mistake that IBM made.
Don't get too excited about the itanium benchmarks. There is an interesting discusstion here about them. It's worth noting that CPU performance can often be vastly improved simply by increasing the amount of on-chip cache. This is what's largely resposible for some of the itanium's high scores, and not the supposedly brilliant VLIW instruction set architecture.
Stick Men
IBM may be the largest company that has a computer manufacturing division, but their are hardly the largest computer company. HP sells more personal computers and more servers. And they make more money at it. That is all that is relevant to the original poster's point. The fact that IBM makes big money sending guys in suits to screw up your application servers is of no relevance to the question at hand.
But at least you were snotty.
You've got to be kidding, HTF is this considered to be "Informative" since it's the same lame-ass crap that every loser posts in any doom-n-gloom story. (I had expected better from a 4-digit UID.)
Moderation
50% Informative
30% Troll
20% Redundant
It's Redundant!
But will neuter its speed much like they did with the 1.17 ghz Pentium 3 w/ 512kb cache.
IA64 will always be faster and Intel has the control to keep it that way by throttling processor speeds and playing games with the prices.
They have the power to keep x86-64 below Itanium from a price/power ratio perspective until such time that the software for Itanium is mature enough that it doesn't matter.
Undoubtedly, this is more like the plan they are likely to take. Give them the x86-64 for those that want it. But make it so Itanium is better so people think x86-64 maybe wasn't as great as they thought.
Looks like Itanium is all set to follow the same path, except at much higher cost and with much more visibility.
Stick six megs of cache on a Xeon, and if the Itanium still wins by a substantial margin, then I'll think that Intel hasn't wasted the last ten years and billions of dollars.
Nothing wrong with sticking a lot of cache on a part -- everyone would, were it not for other issues such as cost -- but that Itanium is better than anything else does not follow.
Itanium puts up impessive numbers, that I can't deny. I'd expect any competent architecture with that much raw die area thrown at the problem to do the same, though. There's little indication that any of the performance gains are due to the architecture of Itanium. In fact, there was an ISCA (?) paper by Intel which reported that major features of Itanium -- eg branch elimination through predication -- were worth a little if you hand-tuned, nil if you had a decent (intel) compiler, and negative if you didn't (gcc at the time).
Which is all just a way of saying that Itanium is just another architecture. It tried some things that worked, some things that didn't, and in the end does well because the ones making it can throw tons of resources at the problem. "Ahead of its time"? No, because in the future, the same thing will be true.
The enemies of Democracy are
Does 64-bit Windows mean that I'll have to reboot twice as often or half as often?
everyone, quick! we need a 64-bit character representation, this guy won't touch 16-bit Unicode!!!
GET WORKING ON IT!
You realize that the reason they use the older processors is because they're more thoroughly debugged than the newer ones? That, and the larger processes they use to make the chips makes it easier to harden them against radiation.
AMD has been well out of the Celeron space and firmly entrenched in the Pentium 4 space with Athlon for some time now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The width of the bus between a 686-era processor and RAM was at least 64-bits wide. The FPU ops completed in trivial numbers of cycles (3, sometimes less). So I don't really see how it being 64-bit helps (hint, it doesn't as far as that's concerned). Not to mention you still had to align doubles on 8-byte boundaries, so that should have told you something.
It's ONLY important for flat addressing and having the extra register set in the case of AMD64. They hardly changed the FPU/MMX layer (they did add more regs and added a 3rd FPU core, which helps to parallelize instructions, but that has nothing to do with the jump from 32 to 64 bit capability)
Keep in mind that 1) 64-bit instructions take an extra byte to encode 2) it's NOT the default, even in 64-bit mode 3) 32-bit instructions are used primarily and are intermixed with 64-bit ones when you don't need them 4) the 32-bit instructions execute even faster on here than on all previous archs. clock per clock. Your FPU code will not use the 64-bit extension byte except when using more than 8 operands in the reg stack (or extended XMM/SSE regs)
For pure FP math, the Opteron succeeds not because it is 64-bit, but because it has another FPU core, and twice as many FPU registers. Also, it's got better branch prediction and is generally faster per clock.
And with your faster number crunching, you use the 64-bit addressing to process data sets >4GB. Capache?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
yes it'll be amd x86-64 compatible. they have no choice. AMD beat them to it and everyone in Redmond likes x86-64 as its easy to understand and familiar and they absolutely refuse to support more than one 64bit x86 instruction set because that would mean lower computer sales (read: sw licenses) all around.
Actually you will positively need 64bit computing when you need more than 4GB of RAM for a single application. This is fast becoming a necessity even for end users. No one wants to repeat the nightmare of the 640k original PC barrier.
Intel has made the mistake of believing their own press instead of the market. The x86 architecture which Intel created has achieved such ubiquity and market prentration, and there is such an industry infrastructure around it, that Intel has lost control of the market. Intel did such a good job at racheting up the performance of the architecture that the volumes and infrastructure for x86 effectively destroyed all other chips or relegated them to tiny niches.
Look at Sun. They *hate* the x86/Intel, well actually they hate anything they didn't invent and control, but even they have recently recognized the inevitability of x86 and the lack of enough revenue being available for continued investment in other architectures. But Intel still thinks that they can dictate to the market and that it is Intel and not the architecture that drives the market.
It is just silly to assume that someone would buy the Itanium to run x86 apps slower and at higher cost than they can run them on a Pentium. As for running 64 bit apps, well folks already have architectures for those apps. Why would you move off your SPARC or Power systems to Itanium, which are proven, reliable 64 bit platforms on which mature (read as 'less buggy') 64 bit software already runs.
AMD saw the change in the market and did what made sense. They extended x86 to 64 bits and made 32 bit apps as fast on the 64 bit chips as they are on the leading 32 bit chips. We can use the same bus, drivers, OS's apps, etc and add new 64 bit apps and OS's as we need them. And the AMD part is competitive with the fast Intel 32 bit parts. Why not buy the AMD part now, use as a 32 bit fast processor, but be able to leverage 64 bit apps in 18-36 months. You get more value and future protection for the same price as an Intel 32 bit part.
It is very hard for companies, especially technology companies, when the market says, we don't want new and innovative, we want the same but faster and cheaper. IA-64 may have all kinds of cool stuff for compiler geeks, but it has no benefits to end users unless Intel can deliver 100% compatibility with 32 bit apps, performance of 32 bit apps at the same speed as the top 32 bit processors and sell the chip for the same price as the 32 bit processors, or at a VERY small premium.
I remember hearing about this in 1996 when I started my first college Computer Science class. Intel and HP, two of the biggest names in computers with a market share at that time of 98% of computers on the earth using Intel CPUs or HP design RISC CPUs (mainly Intel CPUs) were going out on a limb and we would have great 64-bit computing by '98, then '99, then, '00, etc ... And we have seen a rush in Itanium chips in no area. Perhaps they work well in the server arena because they are 64-bit CPUs and can compete with Sun, HP, SGI, etc... but so can a G5 and an Opteron. So Intel spend billions on a failed project and will no doubt lose a lot of money doing it. I can't say anything other than "Intel and HP should have donated that money to kids that are starving in third world countries instead of squandering it on a loser project".
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
The G5 is buttloads faster due to the FSB.
I care not for it's 64-bit-ness.
Maybe I will in 10 years, but I doubt I'll ever dabble with CFD, or massive databases on my desktop machine. It's for email, web browsing, and iTunesing. Maybe a little iDVD-ing. The FSB has a huge impact.
I wouldn't pay $20 for a top of the line G4 power mac right now. Not with it's puny FSB.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
See, this is my point.
.. for the average consumer who doesn't know of such things, seeing 2ghz on the G5 and seeing 3.6ghz on a shiny new pentium 4 makes them think that the P4 is almost twice as fast. The fact that the G5 is 64-bit tips the scales... people assume that at twice the bits, it's twice the speed, thus returning the G5 to performance-leader status.
You and I know that at 2ghz, the G5 systems, with their fat, highly tuned bus technology are worlds faster then an intel chip at 2ghz. Nobody in their right mind denies this.
-BUT-
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
"This one chick I know, at this party? She was like, SO drunk, and this guy, Ted? Remember him? He was all she is totally gonna ralph, and I'm like, no way, but he's like definately! And she did, and there were these red chunks! It was awesome."
You might pay for it if people started writing non-linear video editing applications that worked with video clips over 4GB in size.
Itanium
Tianium
Titanium
Titanicum
Titanic
...any more than IBM would ditch Power4/5 architecture, just because they have a commodity market x86 chip with 64-bit address extensions (Opteron).
In the 'big iron' enterprise market against RISC where Itanium is beating everything handily (check out the latest TPC-C list Top 10 where Itanium holds spots 1,2,3,4 (6 out of the Top 10 are Itanium systems running a mix of Linux, HP-UX and Windows on HP and NEC systems), Itanium is gradually out-selling all of the big RISC opponents like Power4. Note that IBM is certainly not spending the money to put up an Opteron cluster (no 32-way or 64-way scaled solutions for it on the horizon) even if they got good enough results (which they wouldn't) if they can't beat Itanium 2 right now with the high-margin Power 4. No doubt they'll have a run at Itanium again this year with Power 5.
But there's no way that Opteron OR a 64-bit Xeon plays in the big high thoughput space, so people that assume Intel would get rid of Itanium simply don't know what they're talking about.
Intel's vascillations have convinced me to go with AMD for my next computer purchase. Seems a good idea anyway with the Phoenix/Microsoft/Intel DRM plans coming up.
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
Are there any?
Let's face it. RC5,SETI whatever they all suck.
IS there REALLY a way I can put my spare cpu cycles to REAL use?
This is true with AMD64, AMD's implementation of 64-bit instructions in x86.
How intel will do it, and if/if not it will provide the same benefits isn't yet completely clear, as there is no working product to test and examine.
That said... at least on UltraSPARC (a 64-bit architecture I've been using for years now), applications compiled to 32-bit are generally faster than the same application compiled to 64-bit, regardless of if/if not you are using GCC or Sun's own compilers (which would, presumably, take best advantage of their chips).
Documentation echoing this notion is here.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Porting Solaris to AMD-64 may end up helping Sparc sales more than hurting - a bigger market for 64-bit Solaris apps will encourage more ISV's to write Solaris apps.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Intel's implementation MUST be exactly the same as Amd64's. Otherwise, there is no point. Microsoft has already said there would not be yet another 64-bit version of Windows. This is the whole reason Intel is even doing this considering it would kill their Itanium market.
They fear they do not have enough experiency buying judges. ;-)
<tangent>
On a side note, monopolies aren't necessarily illegal or even a problem. Microsoft was convicted of being an illegal monopoly. It leveraged its monopoly power in shady ways to enter new markets and damaged markets by throwing its wieght around.
If you claim Microsoft was merely a monopoly, it's much easier for others to defend Microsoft by saying it was being penalized for being successful.
The U.S. does not have free markets. The government provides certain unnatural protections for producers (copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.) that inhibit truly free trade. The government also imposes limits on how much producers are allowed to inhibit the market's ability to choose the best products at the best prices (Sherman Anti-trust Act, etc.).
The problem wasn't that Microsoft had a huge percentage of the market share (a monopoly doesn't mean 100% market share). The problem was that Microsoft used its monopoly power to reduce freedom of the market. The market was less efficient as a direct consequence of Microsoft's actions.
Claiming MS got convicted of being a monopoly is like claiming Clinton got impeached for having an affair. Neither being a monopoly nor having an affair is strictly illegal. False testimony to Congress under oath and bullying markets are both illegal. (Was it purgery or obstruction of justice that got Clinton impeached?)
</tangent>
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Solaris is a 64 bit kernel with a 32 bit or 64 bit userland. Each app needs to be eitehr pure 32 bit or pure 64 bit. That's probably the approach most would take, instead of the evil thunking that was around in Win95
Fool. The x86 architecture is the highest art created by man. Its apparent inelegance belies a sophistication of design beyond your ken.
By not being particularly good at anything, x86 has evolved into a near ideal consumer desktop CPU. Whatever excuses you may make for your favorite alternate desktop chip dying the hard death are meaningless. The simple fact is that nothing else was ever as good.
Whiny know-nothings have been complaining about the x86's supposed inferiority for more than two decades, and the architecture is more dominant than ever before. Why? Simple.
Everything else < x86
they suck to work for, take any bank you can from them in college and then work somewhere else