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Intel Quietly Adopts AMD's x86-64

Posted by timothy on from the or-an-incredible-simulation dept.

HishamMuhammad writes "The rumors reported earlier at /. are confirmed. The latest offerings in the Pentium 4 family now support AMD's x86-64 architecture, even though Intel is not willing to admit it very openly, by using cryptic names like EM64T and (gasp) IA-32e. (The naming issue was discussed on lkml, and the consensus there was to use 'x86-64,' even though sometimes AMD refers to it as 'AMD64'). Intel's FAQ admits their implementation is basically compatible with x86-64, except for the minor differences that have always set Athlons and P4s apart. It's about time Intel jumped on AMD's bandwagon, since its homegrown 64-bit architecture seems not to be doing very well."

5 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just as a side note by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative


    The primary reason seems to be that the dashes and underscores in x86-64 and x86_64 would have caused havoc with much of thier package management software.

  2. Re:Just as a side note by euthyphro · · Score: 5, Informative
    Solaris also elected to use "amd64":
    1 $ uname -a
    SunOS xxxxxxx 5.10 s10_72 i86pc i386 i86pc
    2 $ isainfo
    amd64 i386
    3 $ isainfo -v
    64-bit amd64 applications
    sse2 sse fxsr amd_3dnowx amd_3dnow amd_mmx mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc
    fpu
    32-bit i386 applications
    sse2 sse fxsr amd_3dnowx amd_3dnow amd_mmx mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc
    fpu
  3. Cringely called it... by Anita+Coney · · Score: 5, Informative

    Back on December 26, 2002, Robert X. Cringely stated this would happen.

    --
    If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
  4. Re:AMD Better Get Its Act Together by BlueBiker · · Score: 5, Informative

    AMD processors will soon have SSE3 and don't have much need for HyperThreading to make use of idle execution units as does Pentium 4. The highly efficient Pentium M doesn't need it either.

    AMD had a 1+ year head-start distributing reference materials and winning developer mind-share. They're not likely to lose their advantage anytime soon, especially as Athlon64 is faster than current EMT64 chips in 64-bit mode, is cheaper, and runs cooler.

    You can expect developers to write code that works on both architectures, it'd be unwise to release something which didn't run well on AMD's chips.

  5. AMD's killer advantage is HyperTransport et al by j.+andrew+rogers · · Score: 5, Informative
    The real advantage of AMD's 64-bit system architecture has less to do with its number crunching performance and more to do with the scalability and speed of its I/O and memory architecture e.g. HyperTransport. There is not much to differentiate Intel and AMD in the absolute number crunching arena, but if you start looking at scaling memory, I/O, and the number of cores that can work together, AMD64 leaps ahead.

    If the big advantage of these new 64-bit processors is nominally found in servers, then AMD will clean house because their systems scale and perform VERY well in the server role compared to Intel. Sure, you may not be able to tell the difference between AMD and Intel on the desktop, but for most types of server loads, there is no contest. The Opterons are very, very good server systems, and for many types of loads e.g. database servers, they run rings around Xeon processors for a very low cost.

    Unless Intel matches a very competent ccNUMA and I/O fabric to their EMT64 cores, they will not be competitive where it matters.