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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.
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.
is solaris ported to this baby and theres 64 bit goodness for everyone!!
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.
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!
No, this does not signal that Itanium is doomed. Have a look at www.spec.org and look at the CPU2000 scores. Itanium is starting to kick some serious tail.
However Itanium is not a desktop chip-- its too big. 64-bit x86 will be a consumer product for desktops.
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?
I love it when companies lie out their asses for months until they can flip their strategy around.
"Oh no, desktop users would never need 64 bit support! It's just not something a regular user ne-- CYKE! NOW HERE'S OUR LATEST AND GREATEST 64 BIT CHIP! PLEASE, NO CROWDING!"
It's been a long time.
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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It was made by hard drive manufacturers.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Anyone else find any irony in the title? Intel shifting 64 bit plans?
http://siokaos.org/
Maybe this will help get MS off their asses to put out a 64 Bit OS for Non-Intel (i.e. x86-64) I have wondered why MS has drug itself so slow when they had an Itanium version some time ago soething contractual with Intel ?
:)
32 Bit vs 64 Bit MS operating systems , TWICE as many chances for bugs
No one ever got fired when going w/Big Blue
:)
.::. "Come close to me, Klingon, and let me die with my hands at your throat!" .::.
Check that...no one but a slew of Intel Engineers!
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.
-
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?
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
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.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
My guess is that it is politics that is holding up Microsoft, and in my opinion this serves AMD right. AMD had the perfect opportunity to market their Opteron servers running Linux, but instead they have put all of their marketing muscle behind Windows 2003 and now Microsoft is going to bury a dagger in their back. By the time there is a 64 bit version of Windows that will run their software Intel will get all of the limelight.
Stupid @#$%!!s.
Looks like MS doesn't want two different 64-bit x86 extensions. I'm pretty sure Intel has cross-licensing agreements with AMD that will allow it to use AMD's x86-64 extensions. 'Prescott' may already have it
What differentiates Itanium2 from any Xeon is not the register width, but is the combintion the revoluationary EPIC architecture 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.
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!"
For servers, addressing with more than 32 bits is crucial these days. The question is - how do you get performance improvement on a desktop ?
... well, it has 128 registers.
The real performance gain is in the change of ISA (instruction set architecture). True, calling it 64-bit vs. 32-bit is pretty much a marketing paint. The real issue with x86 is not even the fact that it's CISC - it's the number of registers. Few general-purpose registers means that you have to go to memory A LOT. x86 has 8 GPRs - the compiler can barely allocate 2 or (at most) 3 of them to variables.
It's much easier these to make register operations fast than memory ones. The x86-64 has 16 GPRs - you can actually do some useful register allocation with them and reduce the memory traffic. Itanium
That's why you get performance improvement just by recompiling an app that doesn't even use "long longs" to "64 bits".
The Raven
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."
I imagine this process is well underway, and nearing completions for the Solaris 10 release.
Meanwhile a port of HP-UX is imminent if the Itanium tanks. Take the x86 port effort + 64-bit clean IA64 version and mix together and you get the Opteron optimized version (well, it's a wee bit more complicated than that...)
So we'll have Darwin, *BSD, Linux, HP-UX (probably), Solaris, Windows NT 5.2, zow! All that's left is for Apple to port the GUI, and we'll have a cool platform for the future.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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.
Isnt that what Microsoft did with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95? -- took the 16-bit and 'mixed' with a 32-bit version? *shudder*
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
The reason IA-64 is destined for the scrap heap is the price. Given that I do some memory-intensive things I wanted a 64-bit machine for my new server. I bought an amd64 box simply for one reason: cost!
amd64 is a clever extension of x86 and probably the biggest win are the new registers - that results in quite a performance boost. But IA-64 was just pretty damn cool.
I wish M$ didn't strongarm Intel. If the current headaches of the myDoom worm have taught us anything: architectural diversity is a good thing. I would rather there be 3 64-bit architectures out there (IA-64, amd64, and PPC64); heck bring back Alpha! It means that its one more stumbling block to writing virii.
FWIW, my amd64 box is fast and handles huge jobs easily. With a couple of gigs of swap thrown on it even my Lisp code runs fast (amazing).
One company is just usually faster to the market with one new extension or another because they developed it themselves. If it takes hold, they either license it to the other or give it to the other under a current license. It's in Intel's best interest to keep AMD around to avoid being called a monopoly, so rather than let AMD die due to lack of a standard it needs to survive in the marketplace, they throw it a bone. (Think Microsoft and Apple) Of course, Intel makes it difficult by not licensing socket and slot types anymore, but the basic architecture is still licensed.
It wouldn't surprise me if Intel asked to see AMD's specs in case they wanted to one day include their technology & then used that info to build a compatable processor. I'm sure that Intel could use 3DNow! instructions if it wanted to, but simply chooses not to. (Why give AMD any credit for making something useful when you have other extensions that can do the same job?)
3DNow is somewhat of an extension of MMX, SSE was a response to that, and then you have 3DNow Pro and SSE2, etc. etc.. They just keep evolving the multimedia extensions. SSE2 seems to be the latest thing, so both Athlon 64 and Intel chips support it. I'm sure Intel will have SSE3 and SSE4 out soon and eventually AMD will license those as well --- if it doesn't already have rights to any new technologies from intel for the next few years.
More info on x86 extensions at Evolution of Extensions
See, hearing about things like this pisses me off.
... it's kind of depressing.
... it hasn't taken off. The real pisser, though, is to think that the dominant 64-bit architecture of the future might essentially be i386 with more and bigger registers. Hopefully at least IBM will step in with its POWER-based solutions. Man, if I ever get drunk and start bitter rants, I swear it'll be about processor architectures ...
When I think of all the nice system lines that have died off because their parent companies decided "Well, we could just have Intel make our 64-bit chips, and then make money selling systems", and all the technically nice architectures that are basically dead now because of decisions like that (MIPS, Alpha, et. al)
I mean, I wouldn't mind if Itanium had been more successful. It was actually neat to think of Digital's EV8 team building SMT technology into Itanium. (Is this the work that's been manifested as HT on P4 on Xeon-class machines?) Especially since EPIC is supposed to make things so much different. But
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.
Argh!
This is very bad news for a computing purist.
We get to live with the ugliest hack ever, for
yet another 20 years.
Please burn all CPU designs that contain the
A20 gate.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
You must not be familiar with the x86-64 architecture. Simply recompiling your 32-bit app as 64-bit DOES increase performance. It has nothing to do with 64-bit vs 32-bit, it has to do with the fact that x86-64 provides more registers, and this itself increases performance.
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.
You are wrong on both.
Windows 2000 was released as a release candidate for Alpha and it was a real 64-bit Windows with 64-bit pointers just like the current Itanium versions of Windows.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
Does 64-bit Windows mean that I'll have to reboot twice as often or half as often?
Ahh, but in MY day, we used a 1-bit MC-14500 processor, *and* had to feed the damn DEER for the privelige of EATING them!