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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."
A link to the original on Ars might've been nice:
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http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040804-4070.h
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?
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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They should have gone for 65bit chips.
Who wouldn't want a chip that's one better than the competition?
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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Intel has been, in reality, behind AMD for at least two years. Now it just gets confirmed.
Intel has been publishing some phenemonal research on new processor architectures recently. For example, "Continual Flow Pipelines" appearing in ASPLOS of this year shows some awesome potential. It is a novel new technique for a superscaler out-of-order processor that does not use things like reorder buffers which don't scale well with instruction window size. Surely Intel has patented this technique before publishing in an academic conference.
Intel will catch up rather quickly.
I wonder why the corporate take-up of AMD has been so slow?
As with microsoft, a lot of it has to do with politics, arm-twisting and inertia.
Also, people like to pay more to get the same (or inferior) thing because, of course, in the corporate mind paying more = better product.
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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.