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.

Comments

Compatable?

[petabyte]

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?

Re:64-bit rant [move along]

[thesupraman]

>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.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

[thesupraman]

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.

Re:64-bit Performance

[AusG4]

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.

Good Chips Can Die

[Nom du Keyboard]

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.