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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.
I'm tired of seeing this kind of rubbish. People who do real work on their computers (e.g., engineers and scientists) need 64 bit computing. For example, the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software we used at my company required 64 bit precision for accuracy. That would be painfully slow on a 32 bit machine. Not everybody compiles Linux kernels all day.
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 don't care if my computer is 100 MHz or 3 GHz as long as it runs fast. But the point is that a 3GHz computer will almost certainly run things faster than a 100 MHz computer. I don't know anything about writing software, but speed increases still interest me, and if 64 bit computing provides a speed increase then the end user will care. Even if 64 bit computing just allows for more than 4 Gigs of RAM it will become imporant to the end user in a couple of years when LongHorn XP Ultra-Professional demands at least 8 Gigs of RAM.
For the record, I use a Pentium I with 64 Megs of RAM almost every day.
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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.
You mean you are running integer CFD Code??
Amazing!
All the CFD Codes I run here I run in double precision floating point. (sometimes single precision when the situation allows..)
It must be some pretty funky code to be interger, never come across any real CFD code yet that is..
I mean, 90+% of the runtime of our CFD codes are spent in LAPACK, etc.. so we use the (nery nice) intel optimised versions (ASCII Red was not just a hardware project you know..) which do very very well..
Basically, I call BS!
If you are using some integer codes, then you are the only people I've ever heard of in the industry who are.. it must be very painfull!
And intel CPU's are really quite good at 80bit FP.. especially with the right libraries.
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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I'm tired of seeing this kind of rubbish. People who do real work on their computers blah blah blah...
Suck my ass. I'm sick of seeing pompus assholes denigrating other people's uses of their computers. The work that the rest of us do is just as real as the work that engineers and "scientists" do. My Ray Tracing and rendering would be helped immensely by 64 bit computing.
Just because I'm not modelling the movement of helium atoms in an excited state doesn't mean that I'm not doing "real work".
If your modeling CFD, rendering, cracking RC5, or rewriting HL2, the work that you do is REAL to you!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.