Slashdot Mirror
Intel Begins Shipping 64-bit Prescotts
Rucas writes "With a minimum of fanfare, Intel has begun shipping a version of the Pentium 4 with 64-bit instruction set extensions. The news came to light not via an Intel press release, but rather through the spec sheet for a new server from IBM. In the midst of the new IBM eServer xSeries servers based on the recently released 64-bit Xeon is a blade server powered by the 64-bit Prescott. This marks the first product appearance of the new CPU."
Now it's Intel running behind AMD :)
Scientia est Potentia
64 bit = twice the heat
Intel has been, in reality, behind AMD for at least two years. Now it just gets confirmed.
Bang for the buck means AMD wins hands down.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Is slashdot now an arstechnica news aggregator?
more like arstechnica.com writes....
A link to the original on Ars might've been nice:
t ml
http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040804-4070.h
So I wonder if this new CPU doesn't run as well on desktops as the AMD64. I wonder if the intel guys were waiting for doom3 to come out to see how it ran against a amd64.
"Intel president Paul Otellini said that Intel was building the capability for its 64-bit extensions into Prescott. At the time, he said that Intel wouldn't enable the feature until Microsoft released a 64-bit version of Windows; that operating system is expected later this year. "
Does this mean that we will have disabled and enabled versions? Like the old 486SX and DX (SX I understood was a disabled/failed math co-processor). I suppose like all their other chip lines, each will be labled distinctly with some marketing nomenclature.
Have you Meta Moderated t
The low profile introduction can be explained by the official designation for the new instruction set features: they will be known as the IA32-NIH extensions.
...had a post with a link to the Dell site which was selling the Pentium 4 and Xeons, both with available x86-64 compatibility and ready to order now.
Supposedly Intel released the chips in June too.
It's pretty astounding that major jump from 32-bit to 64-bit processing isn't even mentioned by Intel.
Think about how big a jump it was from the i286 to i386 (16-bit to 32-bit.) That release was a major deal for Intel.
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
In May, at its spring analysts meeting for the business community, Intel president Paul Otellini said that Intel was building the capability for its 64-bit extensions into Prescott. At the time, he said that Intel wouldn't enable the feature until Microsoft released a 64-bit version of Windows; that operating system is expected later this year.
That is, if they get their 32-bit thingy working right to start with
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
Though Xeon-Nocona has been available for more than a month it seems there there are no substantial reports on 64-bit performance of Nocona. Is there anyone here who can report anything about the 64-bit performance of Nocona?
Ok, so Win XP 64-bit is in beta. Great! But where's everything else?
At what point are people actually going to start making 64 bit applications? I'm not talking 64 bit linux or anything like that, I'm talking consumer level apps and games.
I see a lot of people upgrading to 64 bit chips, but what good does it do if there's nothing to utilize them? Is it just for bragging rights or what?
I'm a programmer and I have yet to see a need to get a 64 bit chip.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
You know, I'm starting to feel sorry for Intel; they've had a terribly rough year with no performance gains (while AMD has run past them) and failures with the Prescott (overheating, big time). As we've seen on slashdot, they've recently released their roadmap for the next year and we don't even see speed improvements coming then. Well anyway, about the 64-Prescott. This seems like a very desperate move from Intel in the midst of all their problems -- they've had no official release for this new technology move (this seems sketchy ... this would normally be a humungous deal!) and, moreso, because they're basing this huge move on the Prescott, a chip which has been pushed beyond it's limits. There's reports everywhere about people's fans on heatsinks melting. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what Intel can manage to push out in the coming quarters -- it doesn't seem like them (as has been said by Intel's CEO in an intra-company memo) and, with their past, it only makes sense that they'll emerge from this alive, and may be in the lead again in the near years to come.
Where could I have seen it before.
--- There isn't any problem that can't be solved by a small, low yield nuclear device, is there??
The Stupid heatsink retention mechanism design award!
I saw an opteron install for the first time a few days ago and OMG, why in gods name are they still using the sping clips to hold the heat sinks on.
Those things must weigh a tonne and yet they are still on clips! Somebody tell me clips is just an option rather than the norm.
Still I think I will stay with my mix of 32bit Intels & AMD's and let this mess sort itself out.
To be honest I'd quite like to see Itanium/Power/Sparc win it out, just bacause it would be really nice to get rid of all that legacy crap thats in current CPU's.
x86 is a horrible cludge, 8 to 16 to 32 and now to 64 bits and all by extensions. Get Rid of it now for a better future and faster future chips.
MHz for MHz the x86 gets murdered by all the EPIC and MIPS/SPARC/Power RISC chips.
The Mac lot did emulation of the old CPU & look at the benifits of that.
They had to release now after they found out that XP SP2 was being delays. If Intel waits for Win64 they'll be out of business.
Don't be a Hem, find some new cheese.
I need to know what proper cflags I should use.
Anyway
I'm still unconvinced about 64-bit computing for the present. I think most businesses will wait a long while before making upgrades based on this. One obvious reason is that software is compiled for 32-bit processors, but how much faster is say Gentoo compiled for a 64-bit AMD processor?
A lot of people's arguments defending 64-bit computing is that no software is designed for it. I'm sure I'm completely ignorant on this, but how well does gcc take advantage of it if I were to compile programs to make use of it?
Because the Opteron has an on-die memory controller. That can boost things up to 20% in some cases. It also makes designing motherboards easier because you don't need both a north and southbridge. It makes it harder to upgrade to a new memory technology, but it can be disabled allowing you to do that (I think). If they switched to that buffered "FB-RAM" or whatever (there was an article on the idea a while back on a big hardware site) that would fix that.
But anyway, Intel is stuck in a hard place. Because of the memory controller, their chips perform slower because of the extra latency, so they must ratchet up clockspeeds. The solution? An on-die memory controller. So why don't they do it? They CAN'T.
Intel has been pushing BTX for a variety of reasons (although most people blame Prescott's heat for it). But the way BTX is designed Opteron boards can't be made into a BTX form-factor because the memory is too far away from the CPU (there is too much electrical noise, IIRC). This means that Intel can't switch to an on-die controller without either changing BTX (what I think will happen because of AMD), or finding a way around the noise problem (little faraday cages?).
If you add in things like that the Intel chip only supports 36-bit address (I believe) while the Opteron handles 64-bit addresses (the actual bus is smaller right now, but that could easily be changed) and other performance factors (the top P4EE is outperformed in Doom 3 by a chip that costs more than $800 less, see the Inquirer) and Intel is in hot water.
All of this should be interesting to see what happens. Intel seems to be in trouble (performance wise, at least in the short term).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Fan Boy Alert
Yeah of course a 2000+ AMD will wip a 3.4Ghz P4 EE.
Give it a break.
I was going to buy Althlon MP's except for the fact that USB was broken and they never fixed it.
Have had sound/ide noise issues on Via Boards too.
Go Intel! only 7.5 months behind Apple and IBM who collaborated to put out a nice 64 bit solution in August of '03.
"AMD welcomes Intel to the world of AMD64, said Ben Williams, director of server and workstation marketing at AMD.
It's kind of funny to watch. Intel is choosing their words very carefully. They're saying things like, the new chip "will run programs currently being developed for AMD's 64-bit processors with very little modification." They absolutely refuse to call the new chip "AMD compatible" even though that's exactly what it is. Intel is having a lot of trouble facing the facts: they poured zillions of dollars and years of R&D into an architecture that nobody wants (Itanium), meanwhile AMD got it right (Opteron) and now they're playing catch-up.
You'd think that Intel, moreso than anyone else, would know that you just can't kill x86.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
This way, people will go and slashdot arstechnica!
At the time, he said that Intel wouldn't enable the feature until Microsoft released a 64-bit version of Windows; that operating system is expected later this year.
But according to Computer World,
Microsoft Corp. has further delayed versions of Windows for PCs and servers equipped with x86 processors with 64-bit extensions. Analysts said the extra delay will slow the advent of 64-bit desktop computing and provide a head start for rival operating systems on servers.
Windows Server 2003 for 64-bit Extended Systems and Windows XP 64-bit Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems won't be available until the first half of 2005, a Microsoft spokeswoman said yesterday. The 64-bit Windows XP client was originally due early this year but had already been delayed. The server software was scheduled for late 2004. Who's correct?
Begin sarcasm I want my 64-bit Prescott chip desktop with the most awesome world's number 1 OS a.k.a. Microsoft's Windows XP (64-bit) and I can't take these delays any longer. Waaaa. end sarcasm
Seriously, though... why not release 64-bit prescott for retail and let people install whatever they want... e.g. Linux (64-bit)...
Who the hell needs 64bit CPU's at home. I mean really does word run better? Does a Radeon/GeForce run faster when the CPU is doign 64bits - no!
Fact is that nearly all the AMD64's will be running in 32bit mode running windows XP and 32bit drivers.
Most desktops that are not used for gaming would be fine with a duron/celeron. This rush to 64 bit confirms one great big penis size competition between all the |33+ k1d13z @ h0m3.
486SX - a 486DX with its FPU disabled.
486DX - 486SX with a working FPU.
487 - 486DX with a slightly different pinout for use in 486SX systems and sold as a "math-coprocessor;" actually, it would disable the 486SX and be used exclusively!
Source.
It has been revealed that these 64 bit intel chips are not able to address as much memory as AMD 64 bit chips. Specificaly, whereas the Opteron/Althon64 has a 40 bit physical and 48bit virtual address space (not the same as virtual mem, remember that AMD chips each have a memory controler, thus upto 256 Banks of memory, via 256 processors), these intel chips are limited to 36 bits.
Thats right, the same 36 bits that intel has supported via PXE for years...
Thus, total system memory size for these processors is limited to 64GB, meanwhile the per-processor limit for AMD chips is 1TB, 256TB total in a system (max 256 CPUs, if anyone ever makes a board and Hypertransport bridges capable of supporting such a large number of chips).
Anyway, it is a big difference, and it hints that the actual implementation may be the same old slow PXE implementation intel has had for years (since the pentium pro, if I remember correctly).
------------ This post was made while on percocet and no spell checking has been done. deal.
man is machine
Maybe the reason there was no fanfare is the fact that the chip is shit.
1) "Not invented here". Actually, Intel does have a 64-bit platform, it's called the Itanium. They don't want to detract from their own product line by hyping this. They're marketing it like a way to extend your RAM and a way to get compatibility with those newfangled versions of NT that were once the province of AMD beta testers.
2) The 64-bit instructions are reportedly emulated and are not as fast as the AMD equivalent. Therefore they will make x86_64-specific optimizations seem slow. They'd rather you use it for the 40-bit pointers, but to keep the word sizes 32-bit and not to use those extended registers.
It's a half-hearted effort to get the compatilibity where it matters (OS, database) while exploiting the fact that most of the code is still x86_32 with a sprinkle of performance-critical SSE* and that runs fine on Nocona.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If I were Intel I would be pretty quiet about it as well. How well can one or two of these stack up against a uni or dual Opteron? Sure they have the contiguous memory support (36 bits of it IIRC) but they are lacking the NUMA style Hypertransport interconnects and the on die memory controller.
My guess is that it would work, but they've been fine-tuning it the whole time and so if you could enable an old one, a new chip (pre-enabled) would be faster than an old one, as they were using the extra time MS gave them (intentionally or not) to make things better.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
They should have gone for 65bit chips.
Who wouldn't want a chip that's one better than the competition?
ripped off from extremetech.com (via google) ...
Digital introduced Alpha in 1992 and shipped its first Alpha processor in January 1993
Sun's had 64-bit sparcs for a long time, too.
Wasn't IBM's mainframe 64 bit back in the 1960s.
The reality distortion field does strange things.
You guys are a classic. Ars links EE in the first sentance, and Ars was published a day later than the EE article. You've so obviously got it wrong.
Ok, I'm feeding the trolls, apparently, but it's a legitimate question. And the answer, of course, is:
As long as Microsoft leads the desktop operating system market, and as long as people need backwards compatibility to apps compiled for x86."
Remove those two requirements, and you'll see a different architecture become dominant. But, really, is it likely to happen any time soon?
My Intel 486 is still working fine, that's the best product they've ever made
Also, Anandtech just posted a new roadmap with some info on upcoming 64-bit Pentium 4 CPU/chipsets for the desktop. The Intel 925XE chipset (with 1066MHz FSB) will ship in October along with 64-bit Pentium 4 "F" processors. "F" supposedly means it's a 64-bit Prescott.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Is it another 80x860?
I am bringing this up because Intel refused for a long time to bring in a 64-bit x86 due to invement with HP for Itanium. It seems so odd that we have a chip based on 1970's technology.
Itanium was supposed to be surpacing x86 by now like NT replaced win95 derivitives. Intel has a notion of sunkin costs while HP would rather beat a dead horse than admit it failed after billions of billions of dollars of development. I guess its the culture of zero accountability and perfection with no room for mistakes that Fiona implemented.
x86 just wont die.
I would prefer to see the Alpha as an eventual replacement for the aging x86 and its a shame it was bought up just to boast the Itanium.
Well long live the Pentium 64-bit and forever x86.
http://saveie6.com/
What right does Ars have to claim that they "own" some paticular piece of information? That's not a riht in the Constitution, nor in the UN Declaraition of Human Rights.
I sense a lawsuit from HP soon.
Remember back in 95 Intel/HP worked together after the 32-bit windows95 came out to make a new 64-bit chip that was new and modern without the outdated 1970's x86 code.
Itanium or mercedes as it was supposed to be called then was supposed to come out in 1997 to run NT and Montery Unix from Sco. It never happened after very poor performance and expensive manufactoring costs.
Then Mercedes2 came out and HP renamed it as the Itanium due to the bad marketing.
Looks like in the 64 bit server space that it never took on and Intel is worried about losing marketshare to Sun, IBM, SGI, and now AMD.
This is why Intel is being quiet. HP still refused to update the alpha or Pa-RISC because they demand a return on their investment. Otherwise HP could sue Intel for breach of contract.
http://saveie6.com/
As EE Times Reports:
Prescott is also Intel's first processor to support a security technology code-named Le Grande. While Intel has not yet detailed the technology, it is believed to provide a protected space in main memory for a secure execution mode required as part of Palladium, a new PC security scheme being developed by Microsoft Corp.
Le Grande is Intel's codename for Trusted Computing. HP's codename is ProtectTools, Cisco's codename appears to be either NetworkAdmissionControl or SelfDefendingNetwork, Phoenix BIOS code name is CoreManagedEnvironment, and of course we all know Microsoft's codename was Palladium and now is NaGSCaB and is slated to appear in Longhorn.
If you scroll down near the bottom of this page you can catch a look at a micrograph of the Prescott from about a year ago. Note that the Trusted Computing core is it's own an entire CPU and memory and support structures, and eats up about 20% of the chip. In other words Trusted Computing core ties up around 25 million transistors of real-estate, or about half of a Pentium 4.
It will support encrypted code (to secure it against you, the owner), it will encrypt RAM access (again, secure against you) and take over a portion of your cache. It will carry a unique key to identify you and your machine, but far more powerful than the old CPU serial numbers. It will forbid you to know your own encryption keys and prohibit you from decrypting your own data. I know it's designed to work with a "secure clock" (wouldn't want you the owner to be able to "tamper" with the time, now would they?), but I'm not sure if the secure clock is inside the CPU or planned to be external.
AMD has their own Trusted Computing project, but I have been having trouble digging out any hard info. It *may* be incorporated into the Opteron processor.
Transmeta has a trusted Computing project too, the TSX system - Transmeta Security eXtensions. I beleive initially appearing in the Caruso5800.
Welcome to tomorrow. Resistance is futile, all your base already belong to us, Slavery is Freedom, and always remember The Computer Is Your Friend.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
486SX wasn't failed, they actually cut the traces to the FPU. Other than that the chip layout was identical.
Later SXs may have omitted the FPU completely but given that the SX was what amounted to a "loss leader" for Intel, intended to hold back AMD & Cyrix from the gates, they never spent a whole lot of time engineering the thing.
The real fun was when Intel sold a "FPU upgrade" for some 486SX systems. The "FPU Upgrade" was nothing more than a rebadged 486DX chip that mounted in a socket close to the original 486SX and, when installed, disabled the original 486SX chip.
That was the start of my hatred for Intel. I didn't buy one, I didn't get burned by one, I simply was a geek who knew what a lame duck looked like when he saw one. Crud, even back then I was doing tech support & MIS work.
seriously, the peak of the MS monololy is the Intel, Microsoft, Dell cabal... in the corperate relm they'll do ANYTHING to keep sales of THEIR stuff going... Even though AMD is cheaper, it's not that much cheaper than what you can get a Dell for. Until an AMD maker show up that's Dells equal you won't see AMD taken seriously.
Gee, it's too bad there isn't a really good offering to put together a new cabal... we've got Linux & AMD-64, we just need one serious, hacker/. friendly PC maker to get desperate enough to turn the screws.
Techincally Opteron works in NUMA [non-Uniform Memory Access] so each processor has ram connected to it...see Tyan's "superboard" with 4 processors, 8 channels of DDR $ 16 slots for an example of one crowded MOBO! Remember too, that you can only "barely" get 2GB ram chips and they're VERY expensive... there's nobody with enough money to max the things out...or at least be more than a niche!! Combine NUMA with the 1Gig hypertransport dedicated point-to-point between processors and you've got HUGE Bandwidth going on.
It's weird to see intel not leading the market
It really seems like everyone is having trouble ramping up the CPU speeds now. It seems to me that in the future the focus will be moving more controler logic onto the CPU. With all the problems with die shrinks and leakage, it seems like the logical thing to do to improve system performance. (Moving more NB/SB system logic onto the CPU, rather than trying to ramp up the Ghz.) Or maybe im just full of crap?
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Dell precision 670s have these chips in them and ive had a few of them for over a week.
Please do not post links to thefreedictionary.com - they are a dodgy site which repackages Wikipedia content, with ads, for profit, whilst stretching the GFDL as far as they possibly can.
Look at that link you posted - you'll see a credit to Wikipedia at the bottom. Now disable javascript in your browser and refresh - ooh, the credit is gone! They insert it in with javascript rather than putting it in the body of the page to ensure that Google doesn't pick it up. Why? Because a link to Wikipedia's article would help lift Wikipedia's pagerank above that of thefreedictionary.com.
Just say no, and if you want to read about PAE, read the original Wikipedia article.
It is believed that Intel could turn on 64-bit capability in already shipped Prescott cores just by having the user load a microcode update (just like the ones shipped in the BIOS to fix CPU errata.)
Does anyone know if this is true, or did they have to fix some circuit bugs before it was re-released? It apparently was true for hyperthreading on early Northwoods.
I believe that's just the new colour scheme.
HAND.
Noticeably no Spec 2000 numbers have been released for Nacona with 64bit addressing!!!
0 4q2/cpu2 000-20040419-02982.asc0 0/results/res2004q1/cpu2 000-20040126-02775.asc0 0/results/res2004q2/cpu2 000-20040518-03050.asc
In case anyone finds them, I've put some contemporary numbers for comparison. These are Spec 2k, Int, 64 Unix OS, base:
Opteron 2.2Ghz 1338 Suse 64bit
Itanium 2, 1.5Ghz 1380 HPUX
Fujitsu, 1.9Ghz 1174 Solaris
Nothing yet on Power5 on the spec.org website, and there are faster 32 bit Opteron numbers.
Spec(tm) links:
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res20
http://www.spec.org/cpu20
http://www.spec.org/cpu20
I ran into a similar issue dealing with some local banking institutions years ago. EVERY bank in this area was hooked on Token Ring. Now this was understandable from the perspective that Token Ring was arguably better than most older forms of networking, but this was 1997. New installations were still getting 16 Mbit Token installed. In some case we saw twisted pair installations, but they were still running 16 Mbit Token! What the hell? Ethernet over twisted pair was so much cheaper, faster, AND established.
Then I started noticing that EVERYTHING was IBM. The servers, the workstations, even the CABLING. I saw this at every bank we did work for (at least 8 different organizations).
So if it wasn't for the quality, expense, and/or speed, what was it? I later learned that this was a common theme in many larger organizations and it had a lot to do with how much IT stock was owned by the execs.
A friend of mine - a CIO - relayed to me that when a large organization buys a ton of equipment from IBM, the resulting sales figures usually give a bounce to the stock. Better still, if you coordinate your efforts with other execs in other companies, you can often make yourself a tidy profit.
During my time consulting for these banks, management did not want to hear about any other solution that wasn't IBM. I suspect that most Fortune 500 companies play a similar game with Dell product - and that would certainly help explain Intel's entrenchment.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
We wanted to buy an AMD64 machine, because we needed to develop 64-bit software for a customer that specifically requires it. However, Dell didn't sell one. We looked at alternative machines, from such "unknown brands" as HP. Then last week I got an email from my manager, pointing to an Intel 64bit machine on the Dell website. The tone of the email was one of relief - at least now we could buy from a company that we _know_ makes slow overpriced garbage, with graphics cards that crap out in months, harddisks that run at For the record, we are not a Dell preferred customer and pay list prices like every other sucker out there.
Many people have 1GB RAM and certain current x32 OS'es cannot use more than ~900MB physical memory without slowing down quite a bit (because addressing more requires lots of trickery with the page tables and segmentation model).
(According to the Linux kernel config help it's not worth it to switch on 1GB/2GB/whatever support to address more memory unless you have at least 2GB physical RAM).
HAND.
I fear that Intel didn't do it right, and we'll be stuck with the lowest common denominator as a result. Can someone point me to where a list of known incompatabilities are.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The was talking about logical linear addressing. Fragmentation can be handled quite easily at the memory mapping level simply by mapping consecutive logical pages to consecutive physical pages. (Or are you talking about some other form of fragmentation?)
HAND.
In half the space (@ 90nm)!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When AMD K7 came up for the first time, it was the heat king especially in Indian conditions. The machines would reboot randomly until I fitted an extra intake fan and underclock it by 80% !!.
:)
My old P3 450 would however run as long as I wanted it to...
How the times have changed
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Because it reduces the price their non-64 bit prescotts can sell for. why release a chip when there is no need, and that will reduce the selling price of the rest of your product line? Its called maximizing profits.
Wasn't the SX also compatible with different/older memory types, while the 'DX' required EDO? I seem to recall something about the SX being 32bit internally but only having a 16bit bus, while the DX was 32bit across the board.
Quote from ???: "There are lies; there are damn lies; and there are benchmarks."
...About this move to 64 bit processing. I'm glad that years ago I chose AMD over Intel, and hopefully now some of my weary friends will see that it's not raw MHZ that make the difference in quality computing.
Bla faa faa.
The DX would work fine on FPM and EDO RAM, IIRC. The 386SX was the chip that had a 16-bit external bus. SX and DX in terms of the 486 only meant whether or not it had an enabled FPU.
For us in .uk a "Prescott" is a byword for a bumbling buffoon.
.uk you should not that Prescott is our Deputy Prime Minister.
Characterised by:
1). Rambling incoherent communications.
2). A violent temper which could blow at any time.
3). A tendancy to do a rapid about about-face whenever challenged by the realities of hard work.
Do we really need a chip like this?
Note: For those not in
thats a fault of PCI in general or a borked BIOS, not the chipset. a PCI video card can do it on any chipset -- intel or otherwise. s3 and matrox cards used to cause this all the time.
one way to fix it is to adjust the pci latency timer of devices. this has nothing to do with intel or amd or anything else. it's a function of the way PCI works, period.
They're not hyping it since their pal Microsoft has delayed 64-bit Windows. Intel probably doesn't want to put pressure on Microsoft since Microsoft might favour AMD more.
Intel have already lost out on providing XBox2 with a CPU.
they bet everything they had on it, and blew it. had it been successful it would have destroyed amd and everyone else.
in the meantime intel neglected their core market, their current architectures are hitting their design ceilings (eg throttling problems with the current P4s), and they dont have any new architecture to jump to.
amd took the low risk approach, and is now eating intel for lunch. they have a brand new architecture which they've only begun scaling up.
they were focusing their r&d effort on itanium while neglecting their core market (p4, etc).
now intel is desperately playing catch up with amd.
it goes to show you that even companies in monopolistic positions can make colossal fuckups and lose market dominance.
maybe one of these days microsoft will fuckup too.
For anyone in the UK this is a Prescott
s tm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2968074.
From which I can only conclude that the chip fat (runs hot), lazy (slow) and prone to gaffs (full of bugs)
um, a lot?
p age3.htm l
very few things run slower in 64bit, nearly everything runs faster. some software is wildly faster in 64bit than 32bit.
gcc doesnt really take advantage of the larger register set yet, but lots of code should see benefits, especially memory intensive stuff. you get to smack stuff around 64bits at a time instead of 32.
there are other benefits as well, such as the amd64's power efficiency vs intel:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-
if you want to fry eggs and compute more slowly while paying more money for the privilege, intel is definitely the way to go.
At the time, he said that Intel wouldn't enable the feature until Microsoft released a 64-bit version of Windows; that operating system is expected later this year.
A lot of servers run Linux or BSD on x86.
Linux and some BSDs support 64-bit x86 already.
AMD will be eating up those markets while Intel faff about waiting for Microsoft.
Have Intel lost it completely? Are they really so unable to cut their losses on Itanium that they're just going to sit back and watch AMD dominate an entire market?!
Yeah but just think of the marketing possibilities. Buy a Prescott and get two Jaguars, free![1]
[1]: London congestion charge not included.
Actually, either "Typically" or "generally" is redundant in your first sentence. One means the other.
Please post a link where *Microsoft* directly gives hardware requirements for Longhorn.
Yes, I know the mad specs (dual-core 4 to 6 GHz etc.) that are floating around. I'm not sure which reported/analyst pulled those out of his/her arse. So far we don't have the word from Microsoft.
For sure Microsoft is aware what is probably going to be the minimum home/office PC when Longhorn ships. And it's not going to be anything like those silly specs describe, not in 2006!
If Microsoft does one thing very well it is marketing, and marketing of course involves market research. Expect some realistic hardware requirements from them by the time Longhorn goes from alpha to beta.
VIA sucks
NForce still has issues
SiS is almost out of the picture
Why doesn't AMD go back to making chipsets?!
Exactly. So what a wonderful opportunity this is to upgrade to a 64-bit Prescott from the 2-bit version we have now.
He's willing to trade "Crusoe" for "Caruso".
because 64 bit processing has ALWAYS been only used for real computing... I.E. NON Microsoft based OS machines doing real work.
why should this change now we have a super cheap version of a 64 bit computer???
I hope they delay the 64 bit version forever so linux can get a tenacious foothold in 64 bit land.
To the lovable AC-
1)Not all devices are available as usb/fw combos.
2)Almost no devices need any more throughput than USB Hi-speed provides.
3)Even if 1 and 2 were not the case, it would not be any justification for the parent I replied to, which acted like it didn't matter that the USB2 on the chipset under discussion was completely broken. The fact that there's USB on a (hypothetical) board doesn't excuse bad ps2 ports either.
4)Near as I can tell, few boards using the chipset in question even had firewire.
5)If you are going to accuse me of having my head in my ass, pay more attention to what the fuck you're talking about...because I usually do. And while you're at it, try not to use ridiculous non-words like irregardless while you do it.
Thanks
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
You mean a bloated, but addmittedly powerful chip is going to be call a Prescott?
Quick - someone ring Private Eye!
(for those of you who don't keep up with British politics, John Prescott is His Royal Tonyness' #2).
I'm just worried they'll release a chip called the 'Blunkett'. The CPU that runs you!
You appear to partly talk out of your ass.
:)
There never was a "Mercedes". The brand name has been Itanium all along (with Itanium 2 as the current offering). The corresponding internal codenames have been "Merced" and "McKinley", respectively.
"Project Monterey" (not "Montery") wasn't just from SCO, but from IBM & SCO. It's a project codename, I don't know what the finished Unix product would have been called.
HP never renamed anything. How could they do that alone? They just co-developed it with Intel; Intel is the manufacturer, with a larger stake in the project. There has never been a "Merced 2" (nor "Mercedes 2") codename. You are talking about McKinley a.k.a. Itanium 2, see above.
HP has already End-Of-Lifed the Alpha and PA-RISC product lines; your "HP refused to update" blurp is simply bollocks. Sure they will manufacture and support them for some more years, but they have already sent the clear message to their customers: IA-64 is the replacement to these architectures.
Otherwise, I agree with your post
3DFX has been out of business for quite a while..
I am the Americas Product Manager for BladeCenter.
The processor in the BladeCenter HS20 3.06GHz we released on August 2nd is a modified Nocona processor mated to a modified Serverworks chipset (few more wires on the memory controller for the extended adressing) to give you EM64T functionality on our existing platform. This is not a EM64T Prescott or Prestonia (we never used Prescott in the HS20, it's a P4, we do Xeon DP in the HS20 which is Prestonia)
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
The Blunkett chip would require a full set of fingerprints and an iris scan before it would allow the computer to boot. It would then log all of your activities and transmit this information to a central location where it would be held indefinitely. An additional processor would be required for visual output.
Longhorn ;)
Don't know if anyone else noticed, but besides the new cpu's, the IBM servers also offer 2.5" scsi hard drives allowing 4 hot swap drives in 1U. Now if they can just get beyond 73GB..:-jmw
You can't even get 8 way opteron systems, 4 is as high as it goes. You call that "incredible scaling for SMP"?
Then I guess the .us equivalent would have to be called the "Cheney" chip, except that I am not sure how one can accomplish a triple-bypass in silicon. Perhaps it is meant to be water-cooled.
--You're BOTH right. It's a floor wax AND a desert topping!
I was talking to my boss that uses Intel motherboards and Intel processors only and he said that he would never buy another AMD chip again since he received a shipment of bad chips. I think it was a very popular bug that a lot of the chips sufferred from at the time of K-II's.
I told him that AMD is currently leading the way in speed, price, and even technology, but he insisted that he'll wait for Intel to make a chip that compares.
OH HELL YEAH! We have been waiting for almost a year for 32/64-bit RAID drivers from VIA for the 2.6.x kernel. I'm mad has hell as they haven't done a goddam thing. Only for the 2.4.x kernel, but that leaves the rest of us out in the cold. AArrgg, I'm so f*cking mad.