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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.
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".
The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?
I thought we settled this back in the early 90s, there is no such thing as RISC versus CISC. The x86 is not CISC, the PPC is not RISC.
uhh, with all due respect, if we have learned anything in the past thirty years from the success of windows, unix, the as/400 and finally x86, it's that architectures are the hardest thing in the world to change due to the massive installed base, and that it's usually better to extend what you have.
just look at os/2, the MCA bus, and now itanium. why would i migrate to a new ISA and lose all the software that I already have when I can just grow my current one?
and x86 isn't that bloated, and cisc isn't that bad. just look at p4 vs. athlon - the tremendous clock speeds realized by the p4's use of an extended pipeline (which is a risc-like optimization) have a tremendous downside - you lose a lot of time resetting the cache if you miss a branch. so for interative programs, as opposed to massive number crunching (and that can be addressed cheaper using MPP and clustering), risc is something of a dog.
finally, you can't say that the desktop is not important to itanium when the line between servers, workstations, and desktops gets blurrier all the time, and the largest growing segment of the market is the low-to-mid-size server.
high-end servers may carry a premium price and have a higher margin, but like lenin said, quantity has a quality all its own.
this is not good news for intel.
>The real question is have they finally dumped the
>stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a
>space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?
Ok, yeah, right, umm....
You DO know that RISC processors generally take up a lot more memory space for a given program, have more instructions, and are often more complex to code for, right?
(of course this assumes you know what a delay slot is, or have understood the pain of manually doing indirect addressing, managing register windows during interrupts, or managing implicit instruction skip flags, the joys of RISC!)
I thought not..
as for the energy argument - get with the 90's - everyone is using similar internal execution units anyway - this is a red heering.
Of course, who am I to stand in the way of fashion..
RISC in it's pure form has not existed for over 10 years now.. neither has CISC, for that matter.
It's about the same as attacking russians for being communist.. it's just not that simple.
The x86 instruction set and successfully covered the widest range of CPU performance ever, and is available in by far the most computers... I would suggest by just about any measure it is by far the most successful ever.
Of course, there seems to be a group of people who cannot stand the pain of thinking about their python interpreter running x86 code internally, or the fact that gcc is generating that for them.
I truly feel sorry for them - they suffer on while the rest of us just get-on-with-the-job(tm).
Sigh.
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
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."
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.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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?
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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