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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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
"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).
------------ This post was made while on percocet and no spell checking has been done. deal.
man is machine
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
They should have gone for 65bit chips.
Who wouldn't want a chip that's one better than the competition?
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.
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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Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
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
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
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.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."