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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.
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.
People would rent time on huge (and hugely expensive) supercomputing centers; greatly simplify the models, knowing they introduce oversimplifications and errors; or, simply, not do the modeling they really wanted to do at all. A friend is working in a chip design company, and his simulations regularily run over an entire weekend, despite the hefty hardware they have.
In some areas (like climate modeling and some kinds of neural simulations), people can _still_ not do the kind of modeling they would really like to do, 64 bit clusters or not.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
As somebody who has worm a *lot* of tin foil hats...
.96 for AMD64 picked up my ethernet right off, and my sound seems to work for playing, but I haven't gotten it to record anything. The detonators are still a work in progress... I hear reports of people getting them running, but I have no luck.
The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.
I have to point out than Windows Server 2003 64 bit edition is currently a free download from MS's website, and comes with a one year free trial.
I have it installed. I rather like it. But, it's damn well not ready for prime time. It couldn't pick up the ethernet on my Athlon64 without some headaches. Lots of people are having trouble with SATA. There is no hardware 3D, even with the latest detonators. My sound hardware apparently has no driver support of any sort.
Seriously, it just isn't ready. MS is doing some respectable things with 2k3. No stupid luna theme, IE is way locked down by default, and it bitches at you if you try a weak administrator password. (it's even pickier than Linux about what it calls 'weak')
Linux is in a much better state. Fedora Core
And yes, I really do mean that I wear a lot of tin foil hats. I even visited the Periodic Table Table whilst wearing one. I got into a discussion with Theodore Gray about the purity of the aluminium in 'Tin Foil' Hats, while I was at Wolfram research. I own a VAX, an Athlon 64, and I've made a pilgrimage to the periodic table table. Do I get a Karma bonus?
One company is just usually faster to the market with one new extension or another because they developed it themselves. If it takes hold, they either license it to the other or give it to the other under a current license. It's in Intel's best interest to keep AMD around to avoid being called a monopoly, so rather than let AMD die due to lack of a standard it needs to survive in the marketplace, they throw it a bone. (Think Microsoft and Apple) Of course, Intel makes it difficult by not licensing socket and slot types anymore, but the basic architecture is still licensed.
It wouldn't surprise me if Intel asked to see AMD's specs in case they wanted to one day include their technology & then used that info to build a compatable processor. I'm sure that Intel could use 3DNow! instructions if it wanted to, but simply chooses not to. (Why give AMD any credit for making something useful when you have other extensions that can do the same job?)
3DNow is somewhat of an extension of MMX, SSE was a response to that, and then you have 3DNow Pro and SSE2, etc. etc.. They just keep evolving the multimedia extensions. SSE2 seems to be the latest thing, so both Athlon 64 and Intel chips support it. I'm sure Intel will have SSE3 and SSE4 out soon and eventually AMD will license those as well --- if it doesn't already have rights to any new technologies from intel for the next few years.
More info on x86 extensions at Evolution of Extensions
You are wrong on both.
Windows 2000 was released as a release candidate for Alpha and it was a real 64-bit Windows with 64-bit pointers just like the current Itanium versions of Windows.