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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.
THIS ARTICLE SUMMARY NEEDS MORE UPPERCASE.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like MICHAEL SIMS BLOWING A GASKET.
for clarification :)
Now slashdot will clarify things that businesses cannot ;)
I could change the world, but GOD won't give me the source code
Whoa easy on the caps there cowboy :)
Nobody smart reads Slashdot, otherwise the goose is loose.
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....
[ Don't reply to this ]
If there was any doubt that Slashdot is a valid news source, those fears can now be LAYED TO REST.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
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???
All your instructions are belong to us.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I'd rather have AMD be the leader than Intel. I've always been happy with AMD, seeing as how they don't bloat the appearance of speed on their cards to the average dolt at the expense of clear technical data.
http://mediagoblin.org/
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?"
Keep reading down the comments at the linked site and you'll see an even more explicit gem from Linus:
Actually, I'm a bit disgusted at Intel for not even _mentioning_ AMD in their documentation or their releases, so I'd almost be inclined to rename the thing as "AMD64" just to give credit where credit is due. However, it's just not worth the pain and confusion.
Any Intel people on this list: tell your managers to be f*cking ashamed of themselves. Just because Intel didn't care about their customers and has been playing with some other 64-bit architecture that nobody wanted to use is no excuse for not giving credit to AMD for what they did with x86-64.
(I'm really happy Intel finally got with the program, but it's pretty petty to not even mention AMD in the documentation and try to make it look like it was all their idea).
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.
everything in moderation
..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.
On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Mikael Pettersson wrote: ;)
>
> What about naming? IA-64 is taken, AMD64 is too specific, Intel's
> "IA-32e" sounds too vague, and I find x86-64 / x86_64 difficult to type.
> "x64" perhaps?
x86-64 it is. Maybe you can remap one of your function keys to send the
sequence
This whole "ia32" crap has always been ridiculous - nobody has _ever_
called an x86 anything but x86, and Intel is just making it worse by
adding random illogical letters to the end.
In contrast, x86-64 tells you _exactly_ what it's all about, and is what
the kernel has always called the architecture anyway.
Linus
On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Herbert Poetzl wrote:
>
> hmm, so the current x86_64 will be changed to x86-64 or
> will there be x86_64 and x86-64?
No. The filesystem policy _tends_ to be that dashes and spaces are turned
into underscores when used as filenames. Don't ask me why (well, the space
part is obvious, since real spaces tend to be a pain to use on the command
line, but don't ask me why people tend to conver a dash to an underscore).
So the real name is (and has always been, as far as I can tell) x86-64.
Actually, I'm a bit disgusted at Intel for not even _mentioning_ AMD in
their documentation or their releases, so I'd almost be inclined to rename
the thing as "AMD64" just to give credit where credit is due. However,
it's just not worth the pain and confusion.
Any Intel people on this list: tell your managers to be f*cking ashamed of
themselves. Just because Intel didn't care about their customers and has
been playing with some other 64-bit architecture that nobody wanted to use
is no excuse for not giving credit to AMD for what they did with x86-64.
(I'm really happy Intel finally got with the program, but it's pretty
petty to not even mention AMD in the documentation and try to make it
look like it was all their idea).
Linus
On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>
> In the long term, x86_64 creates more confusion:
> - SuSE says AMD64 [1]
> - RedHat says AMD64 [2]
> - Debian says AMD64 [3]
>
> Renaming might be some work today, but it might actually remove
> confusion in the future.
Well, the thing is, I _like_ a vendor-neutral name.
I think it's important to have multiple sources for a chip, and I think
one of the problems with IA-64 was that it was a locked-in chip with
patents and no serious competition internally (ignore the Intel mouthing
about "open").
The x86 is so great partly because there's been real competition. So I
think it's very important to x86-64 to have real competition to make sure
nobody gets too dishonest.
So AMD64 is a bad name, partly for the same reason IA32 is a horrible name
(and who have you ever heard use the IA32 name except for people who are
paid to do so by Intel?)
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. Why the f*ck not just come out and say so,
and talk about it? It took people actually reading the manuals (which
didn't mention it either) to convince some people on the architecture
newsgroups that yes, "ia32e" was really the same as "amd64" except in the
small details that have always set Intel and AMD apart.
So I don't really want to change the name. "x86-64" is a good name. I just
wish there was more honesty involved, and less friggin *POSTURING*.
Linus
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.
------
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.
It's about bloddy time. Isn't that what's next?
"The absurd is clear reasoning recognizing its limits"
-Albert Camus
Intel had no choice but to use AMD's instructions if they wanted their chips to be Windows-compatible.
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.
Up until recently, AMD has had to follow in Intel's footsteps. They have been forced to use Intel's extensions for years- until this (VERY) bold move by them. Now, the tables are turned, and Intel are backed into the corner instead of AMD. I love it.
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
AMD and intel have numerous cross liscencing deals goinging on that ammount to Intel can use AMD's IP and AMD can use Intel's IP for, I believe, compatibility. I am not sure about the exact deals but in theory AMD can make a compatible implementation Intel's HyperThreading tech (via reverse engineering) and Intel can (apparently) in practice use AMD's 64 bit extensions with neither paying royalties or considerations to the other. Other examples from the other direction are AMD implementing MMX and SSE as 3DNow and 3dNow Pro.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
RTA. That's actually what the thread was about, whether the arch would be called x86-64 or amd64 or ia32e or what. The consensus, I think, was that it would be x86-64, because it's vendor-neutral, but that it would be spelled x86_64 for reasons such as a) it makes autoconf happy and b) that's how it already is.
Dude... are you serious??
:-)
Take another look. Every article will give a sentence or two to downplay an intel feature and several paragraphs reminding us why such-and-such AMD feature is better.
Maybe I'm thinking of ATI vs nVidia but I'm pretty damn sure it's both of them. TomHardware likes the underdog just like everyone else that's cool.
All your pentiums are not belong to us! We set us up AMDs.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
Since when has reading articles been a requirement of posting in any given Slashdot article?
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.
All your customer are belong to us ;)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
here, check this out. First off, I want to say that Toms Hardware is pretty good at fairly representing all sides but I still think they favor AMD. Here's the opening paragraph to a Athlon XP 3000+ vs. P4 3.06 GHz article. And here's the link.
h tm l
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030210/index.
"It is pretty certain that hardly any x86 architecture processor has a longer history. The idea for the first Athlon core goes back to 1998, when Dirk Meyer of AMD impressed us all and, most importantly, gave a jaded Intel competition jitters.
It was a market revolution, and not long before the Athlon started its victory march, winning everyone's heart along the way. The essential ingredient was its very good price/ performance ratio.
From the very beginning, the focus was on the thrifty end user. Moreover, there was the option of overclocking, which helped countless freaks squeeze the same power as they could with much more expensive CPUs. In short: Athlon became a philosophy, a staple of conversation among sophisticated users, and, in part, the subject of heated debate, the likes of which sometimes degenerates into fanatacism." Wow! I think that makes look AMD look pretty good. Could just be though. Check it out.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
Even back in the Apple ][ days when you had no choice in the matter?
I didn't see it as: unimportant/important.
...which makes it even funnier...
I saw it as: quiet/LOUD!
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
but does anyone else find IA-32e to be a STUPID name for a 64-bit processor?
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.
Given a general cpu register like eax it looks like this:
31--------------15-------7------0 Bits
|--------------eax--------------|
|------ax------|
|--ah---|--al---|
And now AMD's come up with the brillant idea of extending a register. The 64 bit accumlitive register is now RAX with it's low 32 bits being EAX and the low 16 are ax and so on.
The continuation of adding on register extensions is great for backwards compatiblity but it makes the instruction set a mess. Intel knows this but people don't seem to be will to give up compatibility or performace. The only way this is probably ever going to go away is if every one is forced to write a C compiler.
The sad thing is that a new cpu could have a compatibility layer that had a slight performance hit but with a lack of software supporting new 64 implementations people wouldn't buy it because the pretty little bar graphs that the sales drones produce.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
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!
Seriously people, everything but x86 is Big endian, and we (embedded software people) have endian issues all the time. Wil there finally be 32 and 64 bit big endian instructions?
PLEASE SAY YES!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
Downplaying the announcement wasn't just to keep down the shame of following their chief rival, it was also to confuse those in the current market for a new server. From what I understand, Itanium/Itanic has been a serious flop thus far. What will the motivation be for IT departments to buy Itaniums now if they know something more compatible and better for them is coming along Real Soon Now?
Here are the immportant parts of the article from CNET:
Because of the details of a lengthy 1995 legal settlement between Intel and AMD, Intel can in all probability create and sell chips that are completely compatible with AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips, which can run both 32- and 64-bit software, according to the companies and legal experts. Intel won't even have to pay AMD royalties if it incorporates ideas from any AMD patents into its chips.
"My understanding, based on the licensing agreement, is that Intel has access to AMD's patents so patent protection should not be a problem," said Richard Belgard, a noted patent consultant.
Intel may have to rename some of the instructions, or commands, embedded in any chip that is similar to Opteron, but "the code can be 100 percent compatible," Belgard added.
For the full article:
Article at CNet
Sunny
Be my Friend
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021226. html
Either way, it only helps the consumer to have a standard like this.
Even in those days, not everyone did things half-ASCII.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Are you serious? Tom? Is that you?
Here:
"There is nothing finer than raising the hackles of delusional AMD lovers. However, today I do so with a heavy heart. This is no time to take aim at the pompous, self-righteous head-in-the-sand-ostriches of the alternative chip lifestyle. One must embrace them, hug them and wipe away their tears.
They are the freaks of low-cost computing, the poor, downtrodden users of products that never seem to be able to match PR numbers to actual performance, now almost beaten into marginality for all time. "
(Ridiculous remarks curteousy of Omid, General Manager, U.S. Operations for Tom's Hardware)
You need some serious psychological help if you're crazy enough to believe that they're actually pro-AMD. They're not just pro-Intel, they're pro-$ADVERTISER. Generally speaking, their articles are skewed towards a select few especially heavy advertisers. They'll even work with different driver revisions and bios settings to maximize the advantage for Intel et al. There was even an article in which Tom himself admitted that he sent the results 'back to the labs for more testing' after the AMD chips performed a bit too well for his tastes. He didn't say why he sent the results back, but when you look at the articles surrounding it and see 9 articles with a pro-Intel slant, 1 with benchmarks that seem favorable for AMD, and the 1 gets the results sent back for 'further testing', you get a good indication of what's happening. Tell me this: why is it that Tom's benchmarks tell such a different story from virtually every other hardware sites'? Is it some massive AMD conspiracy? Why is it that Ace's says one thing, and Tom's says something totally different? (Ace's is a technical-minded person's hangout, as opposed to the consumer-oriented Tom's)
Wake up - Tom's is a propaganda machine serving up dumbed-down consumer grade articles with rigged benchmarks and non-sequitur conclusions.
It's a joke, and quite frankly, it's becoming pathetic.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It is fairly well-known to insiders that Dave Cutler, chief software architect for Windows NT at Microsoft, approached AMD with the concept of extending the x86 instruction set for 64-bit instructions and data.
The motivation for this move was probably complicated, but Intel's slow-motion malaise regarding its IA64 strategy was no help. Microsoft needed a 64-bit platform that would gain wide acceptance before it devoted a significant amount of resources to drive Windows support on the platform to consumer-level quality.
Some even make the further claim that Cutler may have actually designed the instruction set for AMD and handed it to them intact. In other words, he approached them and said, "If you build a chip that runs this instruction set, we can guarantee NT support for it, and backwards compatibility with x86-32 will come for free."
AMD even acknowledges Dave Cutler and has a page with his information on their web site. If you do a search for articles, you'll find supposedly leaked memos mentioning builds of NT running on the new chip before it was even announced publicly (and hence before SuSe knew about it either).
You be the judge.
First HP makes PA-RISC. This turns out to be a kick-ass architecture with a lot of room to grow. Years go by and Intel enters into a partnership with HP to develop PA-RISC into Merced... nee Itanium. This is good. Intel of course bojos everything up and many millions of dollars later, we have really kick-ass PA-RISC chips and Itanium 1 which nobody gives a rats ass about. Some improvement later and we still have some even more kick-ass HPPA chips and Itanium 2 and its ilk.
Then $SUIT_IN_THE_EXTREME Carly decides after buying CornPACK and Tandem to say F*** all common sense... we have this next-gen PA-RISC design called MAKO and our current Superdomes that outperform Itanium 2 (but shhh don't publish those results)... lets throw it all out... HPPA, MIPS (Himalaya), Alpha, yes all the good processor technology we own... to be dependent on Intel who has no prior experience with 64 bits other than our partnership that makes crappy chips and bet the farm on Intel as being the bomb diggity of 64-bitness.
Now Intel realizes... WE GOOFED big time. WE HUFFED the SCO crack-pipe... lets make x86-64 (one big head smack for the obvious not occurring to them earlier, and another one for extending the life of x86 even farther). WHERE does this leave both Intel (with IBM and POWER4/5/6+ spanking their asses back to the stone age) and poor (NOT) HP who bet the farm on Itanic 2... ?
Oh this is too good.
I hope they both sink in the same boat.
and for AMD's sake I hope they add a fs*ckin thermistor to their procs so if the heat sink is loose they don't smoke themselves... (fsckin unacceptable).