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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.
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.
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.
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?
The AMD64 veriant of of XP is still in beta, the only thing that seems to be holding it back is a 64-bit version of the .NET framework. Though I've been wondering lately if the delay is not the coding, but some more political, along the lines of "Intel and Microsfot are proud to announce the first 64-bit consumer desktop. Oh and *cough* support for AMD too".
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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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.
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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?
Prediction - Intel will spend more outrageous amounts of money ensuring that their new "Penteron64" outperforms the A64's on the market. They will produce vast amounts of Penterons, and release them exactly at the same time as the first 64-bit Windows XP is released.
They will then spend vast amounts of money marketing their new product to PHB's, which will ensure they wrest back market share that AMD has taken while Intel has been sitting around with a finger up the you-know-what.
I say, prepare for the onslaught of the Blue Men Group and the new Penteron64 processor.
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Well they did spend about 2.5-4.0 BILLION on the Itanic. That has a way to blind people, like audophiles and their stupid 'one way sounds better than the other cables'
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."
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.
What differentiates Itanium2 from any Xeon is not the register width, but is the combintion the revoluationary EPIC architecture
...that turns out not to scale as well as originally hoped...
...which don't exist yet.
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.
Yeah, but that's not a fair comparison because you can get a 3.2 GHz Xeon for a third the price of a 1.5 GHz Itanium. Or you could get a 2.0 GHz Opteron for about half the price. Both are faster. Who cares if the Itanium is faster clock-for-clock if they can't get its clock speed very high?
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!"
OK, now I realize this is just a troll. The truth is that both AMD's Opteron and IBM/Apple's G5 are blowing away the Itanium on almost all benchmark apps, and the few where Itanium is better, the Opteron, G5, and Xeon are all far better in price/performance ratio.
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.
Just because they're "the tinfoil hat crowd" doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.
Microsoft has a long and dirty history of colluding with Intel in the interests of their own mutual benefit to the exclusion of the rest of the industry.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
And the repositionings...
Besides the delay, the biggest mistake that Intel made with the Itanic was the idea that the Itanic was a server/workstation processor and not for the desktop. The whole reason that the x86 exists as a server processor is that it is cheap due to massive economies of scale and that a scheissload of software has been written for the x86. Because the Itanic is a niche processor, Intel will both lose out on economies of scale and will have a vastly reduced portfolio of applications written for it.
AMD has made a strong commitment to the desktop market with the Athlon 64 (and low-end Opterons), thus greatly increasing the market for AMD-64 software (which will need to include first rate compilers). They'll be able to spread development costs over a larger number of chips - which will result in less expensive chips.
IBM now has the Mac for expanding the market for the Power processors. Sun has the UltraSparc IIe and IIIi processors for the volume market.
Also remember that low cost 64 bit systems require low cost memory, especially in the larger sizes. Resonably priced 2 GB DIMM's have been available for maybe the last month, 4 GB DIMM's are still outrageously high price.
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Your statements are all correct. What's your point? The poster I was responding to suggested that MS was hiding windows 64 because of collusion with Intel. My response was twofold. First, I pointed out that MS is certainly not hiding win64. Second, the reason you don't hear more about it isn't because Intel is making MS keep things hush hush. The reason is that it's just not ready to sell. MS sees Opteron sales, and knows that they are going to Linux. If they could have win64 ready by now, they would.
And, my mentioning Linux was pretty much just an effort to avoid being assumed to be some sort of MS shill. I'm not a fan of Windows, I just think that win2k3 will be decent when it's done. I wanted to sound leet.
First you say I have to point out than Windows Server 2003 64 bit edition is currently a free download and THEN you go on to point how totally ALPHA-Quality it is.
Mind you, this is not even slightly a Desktop OS (eg WHERE is XP-64?)
And this you're comparing to Linux on AMD64 which works pretty much as good there as it does anywhere else?
... So far, 64bit computing doesn't ... at this point with little immediate return...
Try reading the post properly...
64bit computing will become the standard one day, but microsoft is the king of doing things when they become profitable, NOT when they are new and untested.
Right now MS needs no reason for delaying a 64bit OS other than they don't need to release it now to keep making huge profits.
East Coast Brewers
Why does this sound familiar????
Oh yes!!! I remember! That was the same arguments used when moving from 16-bit to 32-bit some years ago. Now, why did we move to 32-bit at that time? Or maybe you think we should have stayed at 16-bit?
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
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.
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.
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