Slashdot Mirror
Linus on Intel's 64 bit Extensions
ceswiedler writes "KernelTrap is running a thread on the Linux-Kernel mailing list about Intel's new IA-32e 64-bit chip. Linus complains 'what I found so irritating is that _hours_ after the Intel announcement,
people were _still_ confused about whether the new intel chip was actually compatible with AMD's chips.' It is, of course, but you have to do a thorough comparison of Intel's reference manuals to discover that-- they don't mention the fact that their new chip is instruction-set compatible with AMD's x86-64 chip." See the previous story for background. So it looks like the reason Intel was vague about their announcement is that they didn't want the WORLD TO KNOW THAT THEY WERE COPYING AND FOLLOWING AMD rather than developing some new thing on their own. Slashdot is proud to help Intel in this quest; wouldn't want the public to know that INTEL WAS SIMPLY FOLLOWING IN AMD'S FOOTSTEPS. Hope this helps.
In any business, when you are getting your arse kicked, you look at your competitors to see what they are doing. Why reinvent the wheel and all that....
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Intel has to be very careful right now, for years they have been seen as the innovator in processors. Now AMD got the jump on them and they don't dare not respond, but they have to respond in a way that seems like it was thier choic.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Why would Intel be embarassed or whatever to "follow in AMD's footsteps"? I mean, sure Intel's bigger and badder than AMD, but can't you learn something from the little guy sometimes? Don't things like this happen all the time in the car industry with various technologies?
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
but micheal beat me to the punch. I'm not sure whether Torvalds was complaining about Intel not coming out with a ready admission "We had to follow AMD because they got there first" or complaining about programmers missing the (in hindsight, at least) obvious conclusion that Intel would make a Howitzer-size hole in their clean-room booties by not going with the AMD flow.
Good for Intel. You may think that the important thing is that they are "following in AMDs footsteps," but I think the important thing is that people won't have to write for two architectures now.
Good thing AMD never copied the Intel instruction set. Or is it a good thing when AMD trys for market wide compatiblity but a bad thing when Intel does the same?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
..but are still accurate.
Intel will never, ever, ever put anything out that their name isn't all over it.
Example: Firewire. An industry standard. Does Intel put it in their motherboard chipsets? I remember old Intel comments stating their 'commitment to IEEE-1394' but it was all a load of crap. The PII and PIII chipsets could (and should) have had it on board.
Here, finally, Intel has decided to take someone else's tech. But even now, they won't admit it's someone else's tech.
What a bunch of arrogance..
It's the big dogs that copy the little dogs. Both in this case (Intel, AMD) and in the Microsoft, Apple case. It is so satisfying when this happens.
Now, go troll somewhere else.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
This is how technology goes mainstream and becomes inexpensive enough for the everyday consumer: following.
Being a trailblazer may get you bragging rights, but you risk fragmenting the industry and the market you feed. For the longest time in the 90's AMD and Cyrix went on a follow-quest, and breached the low-cost PC market. Not only did they enhance choice and lower prices, they kept the number of standards down to a minimum. Just imagine what would occur if AMD, in the 1990's, came up with something completely different, but can run exactly the same thing Intel chips can at the same price: the market gets fragmented, prices remain high and stagnant, and no one is the winner until one of the two gets clobbered, eliminating competition in the market and raising prices even further.
It's not characteristic for Intel to follow AMD, but IMO, it's the smart thing to do to be competitive.
Oh yes, just because they are following, doesn't mean they can't do it better. AMD did in the 90's and today.
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Amadaeus
The last bastion of Mathie-ism
So we are ridiculing Intel for supporting common architecture and collaborating with competitor? I guess the implication is that the proper thing Intel should have done is develop its own set of 64-bit extensions, making it absolutely incompatible with AMD's offering. The world would be a much better place then, right?
And Intel doesn't really have to advertise the fact that it's AMD-compatible, it's not like AMD owns more than 80% of the market, and Intel is below 20%. To hyperbolize, you don't expect Microsoft to announce the next version of Office to be compatible with Joe's Software Shop's software.
AMD needs to wait until Intel is completely involved in x86 32-64 and then launch a complete advertising compaign to the General Public about this. Show benchmarks. Help manufacturers freindly to their product push their wares. And really nail them hard. No Blue Man Group silliness. No stupid ads. Just plain facts and examples. But they must do so in mainstream media. Telling a bunch of geeks about their products doesn't work, they already get all the information themselves. And they buy based on reasearch anyways, not on advertising.
I don't like the fact that the Slashdot headline takes Intel to task for doing the right thing. It would have been bad for everyone (Intel, AMD, and all of their developers and users) for Intel to adopt a "not-invented-here" approach and conjure up yet another 64-bit instruction set out of thin air. The fact that they didn't is a good thing.
Crappy journalism on Slashdot's part.
Why? Intel could just come and take the high road, and claim that they are keeping their chips instruction-set compatible with AMD64 to "preserve the customers' investment" or some such marketing-speak. Good marketers never let the facts or the truth get in the way of a good spin.
I really don't understand why Intel is handling this so poorly. Someone in the higher ups must have thought this to be a horrible end of the world type of thing. In my mind it isn't. They have ended up making Intel look worse if they would have just quitely said, we are supporting x86-64...which is compatible wiht AMD, at the end of the sentence.
AMD is an x86 processor. Something Intel invented. Becuase of the agreement between Intel and AMD over the use x86, Intel can use the new extensions without paying royalties.
A) The only people that might loose faith in Intel are some techies, most of who are already AMDFanBoys ( and girls ) anyways. The average consumer ain't going to care who created the 64 bit extensions.
B) AMD DID THE WORK. No need waste time designing the specs out.
C) MS has an OS ready to go out the door, no time waiting for you apps to be deployed.
D) AMD has spent a lot of time marketing the technology, all you have to say is we do it with more GHZ ( please don't let the GHZ thing spin off into another thread ).
E) You've got something to help ease the pain between your Xeon and Itanium lines.
This is a good thing for Intel. Sure you are copying AMD's instruction set, but lets face it, compared to the man hours needed to actually implement the instruction set in trannies, an instruction set is pretty simple. Intel saves money, says hey look we are not a monopoly anymore don't hate us, and has a good product.
Intel made a bad PR decision, they should just admit it and move on.
Actually I'm glad that Intel has done at least as much as making it compatible. Shouldn't we at least be glad for this? I mean if they put a bit of marketing spin on what they have done, fine it will go away.
Imagine the mess though, if they decided, "ok we're going to make our instruction set just a little differnt and then use our dominance in the market to win over AMD." It would mean more work for hardware designers (I know PCI bus should take care, but you still need to test), kernel developers, window's driver's writer's, distributors and you and me, because we'll have even a harder time shopping for hardware.
I'm pretty certain that MBAs have been considering the above option. This is a compromise and people have to learn live in a world that is not ideal and thus full of compromises.
then how come there are production versions of Windows xp-64 itanic and win 2003-64 itanic, when there is still only a developer release of Win 2003 amd64?
Wintel, anyone?
It's not about credit, it's about "Developers! Developers! Devlopers!" The general public doesn't give a toss, and few people are going to be snickering behind closed doors over this sensible business decision. But anyone writing low level software - such as Linus - needs to know staight up if it's compatible or not. Not mentioning x86-64 means they screwed around the people that make their chips worth anything.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Well, in this case it was good. I'm sure if it weren't for the 800-lb gorilla Microsoft refusing to support more than one 64-bit X86 architecture, Intel would have annoyingly forked yet another extension incompatible with AMD's.
This would have significantly raised the costs of software packaging for everybody for years to come. In fact, the extra hassle would probably make for a significant decrease in the number of programs that even bothered to release 64-bit versions at all.
People like to think that AMD is a bunch of guys working out of someone's basement. In reality, AMD is a hulking monster of a corporation. This is a company with tens of thousands of employees and 2.7 billion (US) in revenue in 2002. So, yay, one monstrous corpororation is better than another!
What you say is true now but AMD could do some real damage though by launching a series of commercials with some catch phrase (think "Intel inside") that plays up the fact that Intel chips are based on a standard developed by AMD. Something to effect of "Why pay more for a processor based on AMD's standard when you could be paying a lot less and using the real McCoy?"
Not exactly phrased that way, but you get the idea. It could be a real plus for AMD if they could find the right way to market it. Hence Intel doing the smart thing and trying to burry it for as long as they can.
Which is more misleading, engineering chips with an impressive clock speed but a mediocre instruction-per-cycle ratio, or to engineer chips with an impressive instruction-per-cycle ratio and market them as comparable to the industry leader's equivalent processors?
I'm not crazy about AMD's processor ratings, but I understand the necessity. Joe Blow doesn't know squat about processors, all he knows is that higher clock numbers are (supposedly) better. At least AMD keeps their marketing department out of the engineering meetings.
I don't think anyone is surprised by this -- Intel would be nuts to mention AMD in any press release about anything unless it's incredibly negative toward AMD (which this definitely is not), and even then it would be ill-advised from a amrketing perspective.
AMD could send out the press release:
AMD Develops Intel Instruction Set
Sunnyvale, CA -- February 24, 2004 --Intel Corperation announce last week it would be using an instruction set pioneered by long time rival AMD (NYSE:AMD) in it's new 64-bit processor....