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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
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.
A link to the original on Ars might've been nice:
t ml
http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040804-4070.h
"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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Where could I have seen it before.
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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).
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"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.
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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).
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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.
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They should have gone for 65bit chips.
Who wouldn't want a chip that's one better than the competition?
There are also the "intangibles". For example right now software can only use about 3 gigs of memory without hacks (PAE and such). This is because there is only 4 gigs of address space and the OS and libraries must be in there somewhere, so most OSes give the OS 1 or 2 gigs of that address space. And you must map a library into each program's view of the address space, possibly into different areas. With a 64-bit address space, you could give a full 4 gigs to tons of programs, all while having lots of libraries loaded and have a simple linear addressing space for everyone. This simplifies things quite a bit. And when you need to use more than 4 gigs of data, you'll be able to without any performance hit.
The biggest difference you'll see are the registers. While it won't help you type faster into a word processor, it could very well help a game out.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Uh...he did say "within 1GHz of the speed." You're talking about a chip that's well over twice as high in frequency....or, another way, nearly 2GHz faster. Or, a third way, several times as expensive. So, uh....can it.
And while you're at it...what's this about USB being broken and never fixed? I haven't noticed it on any of my AMD machines.
For the record, I have many, many Intel boxes, and many (though not quite *as* many) AMD ones as well. If cost is no object, and insano speed and/or 64bit isn't necessary, I'll choose Intel. If I'm paying for it, it will be an Athlon. If I want the fastest thing I can lay hands on, I'll get an opteron.
There is no point in bickering over vi vs. emacs. Or NVidia vs. 3dfx.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
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?
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.
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Nobody's complaining that Ars was first with it. The complaint is that this /. article is a cut-and-paste of the first paragraph of the Ars article, with the links changed so they don't go to Ars.
I don't think anyone would be complaining if the submitter had written their own summary of the eetimes article. What's lame is not only taking the entire submitted paragraph from another site without credit, but also removing the link *in* that paragraph to a previous Ars article.
Cheers
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If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
But rumor has it that Intel's 64-bit performance is no faster than its 32-bit performance, and slower than AMD's 64-bit performance.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
You're joking right? That is barely true. I suspect for integer performance, the Opteron is the strongest out of all of them. Look at the SpecINT scores, it is dominated by x86 at the top end (Xeons & Opterons) and they are way above everything else at all.
For FP, you're half right. The Itanium2 & POWER4/5 are more than a match for the Opteron and will beat it (especially the POWER5). SPARC & MIPS are waaaay slower. No-one uses them for raw MHz performance, more for a large number of CPU systems.
My REAL WORLD tests show the Opteron is 33% quicker MHz for MHz over Sun's UltraSPARC3/3i/3+ processors. That is a problem for them when the Opteron clocks so much faster too!