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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.
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.
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.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
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.
But the point is that a 3GHz computer will almost certainly run things faster than a 100 MHz computer.
You have fallen into the Intel trap.
There is an exit to your north, it is guarded by a man in a spacesuit.
You have:
- A wallet
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
People would rent time on huge (and hugely expensive) supercomputing centers; greatly simplify the models, knowing they introduce oversimplifications and errors; or, simply, not do the modeling they really wanted to do at all. A friend is working in a chip design company, and his simulations regularily run over an entire weekend, despite the hefty hardware they have.
In some areas (like climate modeling and some kinds of neural simulations), people can _still_ not do the kind of modeling they would really like to do, 64 bit clusters or not.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
So what did you do with all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use?
---
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...
>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.
And then there's the whole no true 64 bit windows yet
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.
If you think about it, it's really very convenient for Intel, and MS hasn't bothered to give any good reason for the delay (especially when you consider that Linux has been available in 64bit land for aeons).
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
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.
-
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
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.
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."
As somebody who has worm a *lot* of tin foil hats...
.96 for AMD64 picked up my ethernet right off, and my sound seems to work for playing, but I haven't gotten it to record anything. The detonators are still a work in progress... I hear reports of people getting them running, but I have no luck.
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.
I have to point out than Windows Server 2003 64 bit edition is currently a free download from MS's website, and comes with a one year free trial.
I have it installed. I rather like it. But, it's damn well not ready for prime time. It couldn't pick up the ethernet on my Athlon64 without some headaches. Lots of people are having trouble with SATA. There is no hardware 3D, even with the latest detonators. My sound hardware apparently has no driver support of any sort.
Seriously, it just isn't ready. MS is doing some respectable things with 2k3. No stupid luna theme, IE is way locked down by default, and it bitches at you if you try a weak administrator password. (it's even pickier than Linux about what it calls 'weak')
Linux is in a much better state. Fedora Core
And yes, I really do mean that I wear a lot of tin foil hats. I even visited the Periodic Table Table whilst wearing one. I got into a discussion with Theodore Gray about the purity of the aluminium in 'Tin Foil' Hats, while I was at Wolfram research. I own a VAX, an Athlon 64, and I've made a pilgrimage to the periodic table table. Do I get a Karma bonus?
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."
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.
There is an exit to your north, it is guarded by a man in a spacesuit.
,"IBMAMDVIATRANSMETA".
:look floor
:get CD
:look CD
:go north
:quit
You have:
- A wallet
: look
There is a PowerPC processor in the corner.
: Get processor
Taken.
The man in the spacesuit fidgets uncomfortably.
: Use processor
You have no software that can run on this processor.
The man in the spacesuit laughs at your predicament.
A geek has also fallen into the intel trap.
: Look geek
He is pasty-skinned and bearded. He seems to shun the light.
: Talk geek
The geek says loudly
The man in the spacesuit screams and departs the room!
The geek leaves the room, giggling.
There is something on the floor near where the geek was standing.
There is a a rewriteable CD on the floor.
Taken.
On closer inspection you notice the CD has been labelled "YellowDog" with a marker pen.
You are in a maze of twisty processor lines, all alike. There is a lot of hype here.
are you sure? (y/n) y
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.