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Intel 64-bit Announcements at IDF
cribb writes "Some fascinating stuff is going on over at the IDF. Ever since the first sneak previews of the Opteron, there has been lots of uncertainty around its future, and that of AMD. AMD have bet everything on the success of their new 64-bit CPU, and with Microsoft severely delaying the release of a 64-bit Windows, and Intel complaining that 64-bit processing has no place in the desktop market, things were starting to look dim for AMD. However, after rumours around the 64-bit extensions of the Pentium 4 EE, it became clear that Intel is not willing to lag behind AMD in the 'innovation' department. Now comes the shocker: Intel boss Craig Barrett today anounced that Xeon-class 64-bit server CPUs codenamed Nocona will be coming out the second half of 2004. It isn't clear whether they will support AMD's Opteron AMD64 extensions. Barrett is quoted saying, 'There will be one operating system that will support all (64-bit) extended systems.' Maybe 64-bit computing is right around the corner after all, and we may even see compatible instruction sets from Intel and AMD! And does this mean that Intel will be dumping Itanium, which never caught on as expected in the server market, and forget the billions spent on developing it?" See some other articles at EE Times, and EWeek.
If you have one of AMD's 64 bit processors you can get a prerelease version of the operating system to try out. Info & a signup link are available here.
Actually, it was made clear during the Q&A at IDF that the instruction set would be compatible with the AMD64 instruction set that AMD pioneered and which Microsoft has already built a 64-bit version of Windows around. Intel will undoubtedly have some 'additional' instructions included, making theirs a superset of AMD64 but the main point is that you will be able to buy one version of 64-bit Windows and install it on either an AMD or Intel-based machine. Now its' just a matter of timing. I would not expect MS to do the full release of their 64-bit Windows until Intel has the matching hardware in the pipeline, curtailing AMD's current lead in that market segment.
======= ~\_/~\_O Burmese
The The Inquirer has some pretty decent (if biased) coverage of this.
Essentially there will be a single OS for the two (Intel and AMD). Unspoken is that Intel's implementation is AMD64 ISA, but a different technical architecture. If it's compatible, who cares. Secondary confirmation via Ars Technica
AMD is the only X86 chipset manufacturer offering 64bit notebook chips. They're clearly seeing the light and hitting a market that Intel's been struggling in for close to 4 years. Intel's claims of no need for 64-bit personal computing is just a smokescreen for their 64-bit failures. As technology advances we will have 64-bit personal computing... and a few years or decades later we'll 128-bit personal computing. Intel just doesn't want to lose face to AMD since AMD is first to market and posting profits.
News.com article
Intel's 64 bit extensions are compatible with AMD's. You will be able to run the same 64 bit OSes on them. Intel's 64-bit capable Xeons are Noconas, which are Prescotts in a Xeon package.
I work for Intel, but I do not speak for Intel. My opinions are not necessarily the opinions of Intel Corporation.
Jonathan Pearce jonathan@pearce.name
3EAAFB2A http://www.jonathan.pearce.name/
Intel won't say if it has licensed AMD's x86-64 extensions. But Barrett seemed to hint that Intel's technology will be somewhat less than completely compatible with AMD's instruction set.
"For the most part, (software) will run on both systems," he said. "Intel has some (things) unique to Intel, which we will make sure people write, port and tune to."
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Sigs are for geeks
Intel's shortcommings in the IA32 to IA64 switch were the following:
In the meantime, AMD took the evolutionary path and provided the 64-bit capability from desktops, to middle tier servers and higher end machines. They implemented an architecture that directly executes the IA32 but that was extended to the much needed now 64-bits. The performance / price ratio are much better than that of Itanium's and compilers were much easier to come about since the x86 ISA is a well known one.
There is no surprise that AMD made the right strategic move to provide the needed missing link in the evolution of the popular (but crappy) x86 ISA to the 64-bit arena. There is no surprise either that heavy weights such as IBM, Dell, SUN and even HP -- who pretty much designed Itanium -- put some of their eggs in their AMD busket.
And there is no surprise that Intel realized after the fact that it should had provided the missing step and it is now playing catch up.
Isn't unbridled competion good? The pervasiveness of Intel forced the AMD and the RISC designers to do their best to improve their own designs which now in turn are forcing Intel to improve its own?
The same story with UNIX/Linux and MS windows.
People need decent alternatives to chose from. Forced monolithic single-vendor solutions are bad for everyone.
The other big news today was AMD's announcement of the HE and EE (wtf they mean is anyone's guess) of low-power Opterons. With these lines you get a full-scale Opteron that only puts out 35 or 50 watts! True they're expensive as heck, but they seem perfect for blades and other large-scale installations where power and AC requirements cost more than the CPUs themselves.
More information: AMD, Intel at xbit
Discussion: AMD, Intel at Ace's
If they do drop Itanium, it wouldn't be the first CPU that Intel spent a bunch of money on, only to kill it when it wasn't accepted by the market.
The iAPX 432 was a 32-bit processor Intel developed starting in 1975 that embodied CISC technology to the max. It was innovative, but also expensive and slow, and targeted towards the Ada programming language, another market failure.
I'm doing many simulations, and so are my fellow students. Modern CAD packages for doing MEMS, nano-tech work with high resolution scream for more RAM. 2GB is barely sufficient, and anything I can feed it is a worthwhile sacrifice. None of our labs can afford Itanics. But we sure can and do need more than 4GB (3GB if windows). I've been advising people to get Opterons whenever they are about to upgrade their systems in order to have an upgrade path in mind.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
64 Bit Extensions
From the Intel FAQ Site:
Q9: Is it possible to write software that will run on Intel's
processors with 64-bit extension technology, and AMD's 64-bit capable
processors?
A9: With both companies designing entirely different architectures, the
question is whether the operating system and software ported to each
processor will run on the other processor, and the answer is yes in
most cases. However, Intel processors support additional features, like
the SSE3 instructions and Hyper-Threading Technology, which are not
supported on non-Intel platforms. As such, we believe developers will
achieve maximum performance and stability by designing specifically for
Intel architectures and by taking advantage of Intel's breadth of
software tools and enabling services.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
MIPS was first (91), Alpha was second (92), Sun was third (95)
It's hard to picture why there will ever be a need for 128-bit computing.
2^64 is 18446744073709551616. This is BIG. 17179869184 gigabytes. 16777216 terabytes of addressable memory. 16384 petabytes. This is basically the maximum amount of physical memory and the maximum size of one individual process's virtual memory mapping on a 64 bit architecture (yes, I know many current 64 bit implementations, including AMD64 are limited to 2^48 in practice; but the architectures can fundamentally handle both 2^64 physical and virtual addressing).
This is enough addressing that you can have 2.5GB of memory in a process for each man, woman, and child on the face of the planet.
And as to doing integer math larger than 2^64-- why? 2^32 is already overkill for most things.
Nope, I don't see "128-bit computing" becoming mainstream anytime soon. And it's far from clear 64 bit on the desktop is all that close, given the fact that A) the added code size contributes cache misses and saps performance, and B) there is not much done on the desktop now that requires more than 2^32 bytes of memory in a process, and C) not much stuff does math on quantities greater than 2^32 (4294967296). Keep in mind bank switching allows you to have more RAM than 4GB on all recent ia32 processors (2^36/2^40).
If we change architectures, it will be less about addressing limitations and more about the piss-poor quantity of registers available on ia32. More registers means more obtainable instruction-level parallelism.. this equals more work done on modern architectures.
Itanium sold over 100,000 cpus last year which is a big number for the enterprise server market (That's more than some other major RISC processors sold in 2003 (like Power 4)).
The other major RISC CPUs sell by the millions. Your whole post is one big pointless troll.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I don't see "128-bit computing" becoming mainstream anytime soon.
Well, the designers of IBM's venerable AS/400 might disagree with you. Its architecture has been enabled for 128-bit computing since the early 1970's.
Care to back up your assertion?
The G5 is a PowerPC. PowerPC is RISC (or was, due to the blurring over the years). Apple is putting G5s into their servers, too.
As far as numbers go, the market reports I see via Google put Sun's annual server sales at 200,000 to 300,000 servers. Multiply by some SMP co-efficient, and it isn't hard to get over 1,000,000. These numbers also do not include workstations, motherboards sold to OEMs, embedded units, and replacement parts. If Itanic is just getting over 100,000, then Intel has some problems, espcially considering just how long that CPU has been around (I first heard about it in college in 1997 or so, I think).
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Compare Itanium to like processors, such as they exist.
So Power4 is the only processor you'll admit to being a "like" processor? The biggest RISC processors are Sparc and PowerPC. Each out sells Itanium by a huge margin.
Sun sold more total systems, but they weren't all SunFires, and we weren't talking about them.
Intel sold 100,000 processors, Sun sold close to 300,000 systems. See the significance of the difference? The parent of this thread was talking about RISC processors. Power4 was mentioned specifically, but Sparcs are certainly in the the same class.
First, your statements above are contradictory, in 1975 there was no Ada programming language, only a spec (steelman ??) that described what the language should contain (and not contain).
Also, it is not clear whether you meant that the 432 or Ada was a marketing failure (or both). Certainly the 432 was. OTOH, from its first release in 1980 or so, the Ada language has been far from a "market failure", despite there being no low-cost compilers for it and despite the limitations required by the SteelMan spec. Virtually all aeronautics, astronautics or critical communications software (Military or civilian) and weapons control software for the last 20 years was written in Ada (and not just in the US).
In addition, several commercial SW firms also found, even w/ Ada-83, that it allowed them to ship w/ far fewer bugs left for customers to find that code written in (Ugh!) C, as well as allowing bug-fixes using less than 50% of the developer resources than to fix bugs in (Ugh!) C.
As of 1995 the Ada language is much more oriented towards general programming, as well as being much cheaper to use than it had been. There has been a FREE (GPL) Ada compiler available since 1995 or so, and it is now (since version 3.2) integrated into GCC.
For more info on how Ada is being used and why it should be used for all new projects, see My small Ada site or David Botton's Ada Power site.