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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.
Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.
Intel has already publicly admitted to having X86 processors with 64 bit extension in development. Also, take a look at microsoft, who refer to X86-64 as "64 bit extended architecture."
Everybody and his brother figured out long ago that Itanium is not something that will penetrate effectively into the desktop market. It's hot, expensive, incompatible, etc. It requires a ton of work to get code running smoothly on Itanium. Th only amazing thing is how long it took intel to admit that it had egg on its face!
I agree. I think Itanium will catch on given two things happen: first, Intel needs to lower the price - I just bought a 1U server and would have loved to have gotten an Itanium - but it's prohibitively expensive compared to P4s or Xeons. Second, the x86 emulation is going to have to improve if Itanium is going to gain acceptance as a desktop cpu (granted if this happens, there will likely be an Itanium clone much line athlon-64 and the opteron). Otherwise I think Itanium is likely to go the way of alphas - a great design but overpriced and with poor application support.
So what did you do with all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use?
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When all they had was a 286 @ 16MHz, they didn't do large-scale simulations of molecules on the computer, or design airplanes mostly on the computer. 64-bit machines already exist, and the software to take advantage of them already exists --- people want to be able to do the things they do on current 64-bit machines on commodity hardware.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No, this does not signal that Itanium is doomed.
I have to agree. What really signals that Itanium is doomed is the fact that no one is buying it.
But you gotta dig the irony: Intel is making an AMD-compatible processor.
One seriously cannot underestimate the significance of binary compatibility. Nowadays The external ISA is a silly detail anyway. Any processor worth the silcon it was made on has a RISC microarchitecture.
Whatever, man. I have G5 and Itanium2 machines at my desk. The HP Itanium2 runs Linux and WinXP 64-bit edition (which came out last June). The Itanium2 (McKinley) is an old slow one that crushes the G5 easliy on everything (using Intel's compiler) by factors of 2-3x. The new Madison Itaniums are substantially faster (look at the SPEC CPU benchmarks). The Itanium is far superior to anything else out there, it just doesn't run x86 code all that fast, and the GNU compiler sucks on the Itanium because the optimzier cannot get the VLIW right. The Itanium is just ahead of its time. And most people are too stuck in the x86 mindset to even see it. CPU buyers lose as a result.
Forgive me if I get a little bored by this 'revelation', I wrote about it in September:
:) )
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668
And I followed it up a week later with this:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11781
Ok, people seem to not taken me seriously then, so I'll reiterate. Prescott has 64 bit extensions built in. They use the AMD64 instruction set. This is because MS twisted their arm into it.
The question of when they turn it on is more a political one than a technical one, and that I don't know the answer to right now, most likely because Intel does not know either. They are in one hell of a bind. If Prescott is 64 bit, why should I pay 5x as much for an Itanic again? Oh yeah, a marginal performance gain on FP code, but a loss on Int. Whoopty-#&%^#-ding-dong.
It will be announced at IDF, count on that. When you can buy it, good question. My guess is that it will be an inticement for the first Prescott/EE buyers.
-Charlie
(As a self-plug, if you read the Inq, you would know these things
I just did some work porting CFD code from IRIX to an Opteron system running Linux. The processor had to be 64 bit because some of the runs we do now require 15 GB of RAM.
I only did the porting work - I only have a vague understanding of how CFD works. So I can't say what percent of the runs require more than 4 GB of RAM, but I've gotten the impression that most runs require over 2 GB of RAM, which is enough to complicate things with a 32 bit OS.
Andy Glew (the designer of the Pentium Pro) on EPIC vs. normal architectures:
"Yes, but the IA-64 EPIC is not a modern architecture -
it is a design by committee, with microarchitects who believed
religious dogma instead of thinking.
At least some modern microarchitectures have made optimization
easier than in their predecessors. Apart from some egregious
glass jaws (mea culpa), P6 was often less sensitive to optimization
than the P5. The compiler folks complained that their unoptimized
code often ran as fast as their optimized code.
AMD's K7 and K8 continue in this vein.
This is one of the reasons I jumped from Intel to AMD:
the Intel P6 is philosophically a lot closer to the AMD K7 and K8
than it is to the Intel Pentium 4 (Willamette, Prescott), or Itanium.
Pentium 4 is fragile, just like Itanium."
Look at how many trouble Intel has trouble admitting they are wrong and following AMD on something. Intel is so used to AMD copycating them on everything, they don't seem to know how to deal with the shoe being on the other foot.
So far Intel has followed AMD onto DDR memory, after dragging their feet for a year. Now it's happening with 64 bits. Next expect to see it with integrated memory controller, desktop dynamic power management(like quick 'n cool) and hypertransport. I'm sure when they come around the technologies might be similar, but they'll have some other name for it. Hopefully, Intel doesn't try the old Microsoft embrace and extend.
Will Intel's extensions to the x86 architecture be compatible with AMD's. Or will fat binaries that can execute in x86, x86-64 Intel and x86-64 AMD be necessary?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.