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AMD Back in the Black
XaXXon writes "CNN reports that AMD had a profitable quarter for the first time in over two years. According to the story this is mostly because of their 64-bit line of chips (both Opterons and Athlon-64). AMD has forced both HP and Intel to change long-standing plans of only supporting Itanium, with HP coming out with Opteron-based systems and Intel releasing chips mimicking the 32/64-bit behaviour of the Opteron. According to the story, 64-bit processors are better than 32-bit ones because 32-bit processors 'can't take advantage of more than 4 megabytes (sic) of memory at a time.'"
As far as I recall, Intel has not released anything yet. They put something on the roadmap, but they are still 100% behind Itanic. They released an improved 32bit emulation environment for the latter though
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
you can adress more than 4 gigs of ram with a 32bit prossessor You just need a cludge (kinda expensive/slow) but itspossible speaking of lots of ram, anyone seen those Ram Harddrives they had at CES a couple years ago
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
When I went to nanotech lab open day, one of the speakers said that 98%-99% of the chips on each wafer must work for the CPU company to make a profit.
Decode these
Humm I have an Athlon 64 mobility in my emachine and it rocks... I get about 3 hours of juice 2 1/2 w/wifi and this thing flys.
- I came I saw I Conquered
the real reason that 64-bit is better is that software should be able to move data around more quickly, typically twice as fast as 32-bit given a well-designed data bus external to the chip.
No.
You can move data around fast if you have a good memory architecture. A wide data bus to external memory. And a bus clocked at high speed. And larger caches.
You can have all of that with both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. The 64-bittness doesn't help here. If everything else is equal (in the memory architecture), I would expect the 64-bit processor to lose slightly since it has wider pointers. That puts more pressure on the caches and uses more memory bandwidth.
64 bit processors are good because they can easily adress more than 4GB virtual memory.
)9TSS
Socket 940 arranges the pins so that it's easy to lay out multiprocessor systems with a 6 layer motherboard (expensive, but you'll want it in a server anyway for reliability reasons). Sockey 939 (real soon now) will work with 4-layer motherboards and so will result in cheaper systems. Both the Athalon 64 and Athalon FX will soon be socket 939, differentiated by the ammount of cache. Opteron will remain as it is, as otherwise your 4 and 8 way boxes won't work. Given that Opteron 8xx is absurdly cheap compared to any other 64 bit 8-way server, I can't see why AMD would want to lower prices.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
It really isn't a FULL 64 bit implementation. In it's current incarnation it supports 40 bit physical and 48 bit virtual address spaces, as I recall. Even the Itanium has only a 44 bit address bus.
Please don't propagate this kind of FUD.
The ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) is fully 64 bits. The pointers really are 64 bits wide. The programs you compile now will be able to fully use a 64-bit wide virtual and physical (will we ever see one?) memory architecture.
This is similar to nearly all previous 64 bit architectures such as Alpha and Sparc (and maybe Power and HP-PA and MIPS?). Most of the actual machines used don't really have 64 bit physical adresses.
You have to distinguish between a ISA and a physical implementation of it. Most motherboards can't host more than a couple of GB memory anyway. But the ISA of the processor is still a true 64 bit architecture.
)9TSS
Haven't seen any problem with AMD processors. It's necessary to follow the Cooling Guidelines, of course.
Make sure you have a good power supply. We use KingWin 350 Watt supplies that have two fans. (Ignore the language, "Extreme Series". That's there just to appeal to gamers, who expect every product to include some reference to violence or games. There is nothing extreme about them, and they are reasonably priced.)
Note that power supply manufacturers sell power supplies that have 100 Watts more rated power for sometimes close to twice the price. That's to take advantage of the "more is better" people.
It depends on the chip and the market. Production yields for ARM CPUs would often be at 95%, a level undreamable by x86 chips.
Dictionary.com. It is used when quoting, to indicate that the transcriber has faithfully reproduced a possible mistake in the source. This is because it is considered bad form to modify a quote, at least without indication through square parantheses, which are generally used for explanatory additions due to loss of context, not corrections. And if 'sic' wasn't put in, it would likely look like an error on the transcriber's part. It's certainly not a /. thing ;-)
Yeah, that Prescott is a cool running chip.
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
Modded +5 Insightful? Now that shows the weakness of the Slashdot moderation system...
Athlon, Athlon 64 and Opteron all have thermal protection, just like the P4s...and have had it for some time.
Further, current P4s dissipate more power than the AMD solutions, due to high clockspeeds that don't equate to better performance except for a slight edge in multimedia codec performance.
In short, at this point AMD is flat out better - and a much better deal to boot. You can pick up an Athlon 64 3000+ for about $210...that's a steal!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
AMD won't have won until Intel starts rating its processors in "equivalent Athlon64 performance". ;)
I'm assuming you're referring to AMD's "Performance Rating." If you are, you might be interested to know that AMD compares their CPUs to a 1Ghz Duron, and NOT any sort of intel chip.
PR3200+ would be 3.2x faster than a 1Ghz Duron.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
AMD has an approach that says they will "build smarter" than their competition. Their flagship fabs (Fab 30 in Dresden, for example) are highly automated with very tight process control, ensuring the right work gets done at the right time. The focus is on equipment utilization; reduction of tool idle time. Further, they focus on minimizing the number of non-product wafers in the line, which take tool time but don't directly produce any chips that can be sold. The management of all this is done through software.
They also have to focus on fab uptime ... since they don't necessarily have the back up manufacturing capability to allow them to recover if their fab is down. For example, AMD makes about two-thirds their revenue from processor sales according to a recent 10-Q filing. Most recent quarter for which there is data (for the period ending 12/28/2003) shows $1,205M in quarterly revenue. You can estimate around $800M in revenue from their processor lines. Fab 30 make nearly all their processors. If Fab 30 were to go down for one hour, that's one hour in the 730 hours in a quarter that they can't make chips. If they have demand that is greater than or equal to capacity, and they're running at full capacity, they would loose roughly $1M due to potential finished goods that could not be made. A cost of $1M per hour of fab down time is pretty typical in the market where AMD competes and for fabs that compare to Fab 30.
A single tool going down is a problem. The entire fab going down is a huge problem. Things that can bring an entire fab down include utilities (electricity, water, gasses, etc.) contamination of facility-wide services like vacuum line, DI water, and various gasses, labor strikes, natural disasters, fires, and plant-wide software.
When you rely on software to manage your manufacturing to the degree that AMD and other high-end semiconductor manufacturers do, you tend to pay a lot of attention to the software.
The Playstation2 does NOT use a 128-bit CPU!!!
The PS2 has a 32-bit CPU core with 128-bit vector units. The Pentium3 also uses a 32-bit CPU core with 128-bit vector units (SSE), as does the Apple/Motorola G4 chip (with Altivec). There has never been a 128-bit CPU used in ANY gaming console, and I'm only aware of 1 64-bit CPU ever used (Nintendo64).
Of course, the reason for this is that going to more bits makes a CPU SLOWER! All else being equal, a 64-bit is 5-10% slower than a 32-bit CPU, and a 128-bit CPU is 10-20% slower than a 64-bit one. Since games don't need to address more than 4GB of memory, it's totally pointless to use a 64-bit CPU in a gaming console. The only other thing that a 64-bit CPU buys you is an integer range of more than 4 billion, and that's RARELY used outside of cryptopgraphy (how often do you do cryptography on your gaming console?).
Of course, all else usually isn't equal (eg AMD64 adds 8 more general purpose registers and cleans up some cruft when compared to IA32). Also PCs often do need to address more than 4GB of memory (virtual + physical).
PCs do not, however, need to address more than 10^19 bytes of memory, and they definitely don't need more than 10^19 integer range for much of anything, so 128-bit CPUs get you absolutely NO positives but you still would have to deal with the 10-20% performance loss.