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Intel Quietly Adopts AMD's x86-64
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."
Although LKML has appeared to agree on x86-64 the folks over at Debian appear to have gone the other way and name the arch amd64.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
How will it perform compared to AMD's chips? AFAIK AMD usually performs better clock to clock?
I suppose in most technical circles that always pull for the underdog and cheer when the big dog stumbles that items like this come as great news. But its appearing more and more like Intel is the one playing catch up. They may still have market share and a far wider range of products to support them, but AMD has taken the Intel bull by the horns and is beginning to bring it to its knees. Problem is, its the competition that has driven the market and without Intel, AMD has no identity. I just hope Intel can turn things around.
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... an Intel guy I chatted with last fall said that they did not expect to put 64-bit processors in desktop machines for at least a decade. I smiled politely. ;) -ghostis
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
As an interesting side note, check out this story. It says that Intel reverse engineered the AMD64 architecture (which isn't terribly surprising) but then flat-out copied the documentation, even though some of their implementation didn't match up!
Nice one, guys.
their glory days are now more or less behind them. No computer in my house uses Intel processors. My family has running AthlonXPs, 1 running a Sempron and 1 Powerbook with a G4. The 32bit AMD hardware is very, very affordable and perfect for tossing together something that just works and needs to be run by someone who doesn't have a lot of disposable income.
No one I know of talks about Intel and 64bit processors except to make fun of the Itanic. The Athlon64 and Opteron processors on the other hand are the objects of lust for many of the geeks I know. When they think 64bit that they can own, they think either AMD or Apple, not Intel.
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AMD have had dual core chips on the roadmap for sometime (I know not the same as SMT/HyperThreading), they will also add SSE3 at the same time. Do Intel have the on chip memory contoller? or the Glueless 4 Way systems?
How is this a big deal? During the 386 days, AMD reverse engineered Intel's processor so they can make clones.
In this biz, it's all about compability. It doesn't suprise me that AMD or Intel would always check each other's work via reverse engineering. It would be fun though, if they could leave each other messages on the die. I remember the old days when we used to study the compition's ROM image and leave messages inside the ROM in our products knowing the compition is gona do the same. The managers however was not amused and put an end to it.
I think that's a bit overstated. They didn't just double the width of the registers and data paths. They upped the address size beyond what I'll be able to afford in the rest of my life, added more registers overall in 64-bit mode, and generally seem to have dealt with the worst constraints imposed by backward compatability with the original 8086/88 processors.
It's hard to call an Opteron an x86 chip. More accurately it's a superset of the x86 archtecture.
What I really wish they'd do next is what IBM pioneered with their 400 series mid-frames. In those systems with 44-bit addressing, every byte of data -- including every byte on every disc drive -- had a unique address. I thought that was a groundbreaking idea at the time.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Intel chips don't have an IOMMU. This means that unless the chipset provides one (none currently do) 32 bit PCI cards cannot do DMA into memory beyond 4GB, forcing the use of bounce-buffers.
In short, 32 bit PCI cards on systems with > 4GB memory will be G L A C I A L L Y S L O W.
On AMD64 the IOMMU remaps memory for 32 bit DMA below 0x10000000, thereby allowing 32 bit cards to access the full 64 bit address space.
The lesson: Buy the original. Buy AMD.
This is not quite true. In fact, AMD was co-developer of x86 architecture, Intel licensed x87 from AMD and they exchanged patents. As court later proved, both have right to use architecture x86 and its extensions. AMD was also sued for microinstruction copying in 486 clones, and lost the court, but the cost of trial for Intel was too big to continue in court.
Therefore, because of these crosslicences, Intel has direct access to AMD64 architecture and AMD has access to SSEx and other x86 subsystems from Intel.
It's funny, b/c they know they don't have "Anything Inside". Now their little stickers are going to say "Powered by AMD Goodies".
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
HP *workstations* dropped support for Itanium. Itanium is doing remarkably well in the high-end server space. Checkout the increase in servers with Intel architecture in them in the Top100 supercomputers.
For those who missed it last time around, Linus was also tempted to call it amd64 in reaction to intel's handling of the subject but decided to stick with the vendor neutral x86-64.
:)
And yeah, this moved from the realm of rumor to fact nearly a year ago
They chose AMD64 because that is the name of the platform. AMD came up with the platform, and thus named it how they chose. Plenty of people supported AMD64 before Intel made compatable chips, and it would be stupid to renamed the arch just to please Intel after the fact. Kinda like how i386 is called i386, since Intel made it.
And given that AMD at least supports open source, and donates hardware to linux distros and BSD projects, and intel are complete assholes about even trying to get docs for hardware, much less donations, I think supporting AMD in naming their arch is the least we can do.
I call bullshit on that. It first appeared in the prescott core. Die photos of northwood and earlier processors clearly do not have the room for AMD 64 bit extensions.
Ian Ameline
Slightly offtopic, but a few days ago Valve's Steam stuff (the bit installed on the victim's PC) ran a poll about gamer's hardware, in which I participated.
/proc/cpu) aside, it's been AMD all the time. I hope they keep doing well.
I was very surprised by the intermediate results: 47% was running an AMD CPU (lots of them 64 bit), Intel at 51% and the rest other wacky stuff. Considering that gaming is a major drive (maybe only windows upgrades are more important --- and those are few and far between lately) in processor upgrades, I'd be worried if I were intel.
Personally, I've been a happy AMD user since their 386-40MHz. A brief flirt with a Pentium Pro and even a fling with a CentaurHauls (or something, I remember that name from
I've seen it mentioned here that the Intel stuff has SSE3 and Hyperthreading, and AMD has Hypertransport and pretty good I/O in general. What nobody seems to have mentioned is that Intel was planning on leaving out support for the "page table NXE bit" which enables some nifty security features, on OpenBSD anyhow:
http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html
Does anyone know if or when Intel will remedy this? I seem to remember reading that it wasn't a permanent problem, and eventually they would add the feature or something.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Back in the day, DEC engineers put a "gotcha" on their chip masks after seeing their designs pop up in Russian made fabs. Magnified sufficiently, you could actually read the words, "VAX: when you care enough to steal the very best."
Sounds like AMD has earned the right to use that line...
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I attended a one day intel channel conference last week and they talked about this when presenting the CPU roadmap for the next few quarters. They were calling it EM64.
What was more interesting is how they seriously played it down as unimportant. It was like, "we now have 64 bit!" "But there are only 2 versions of linux and a beta version of winXP that use it so it's not really that important." "and all your apps are still 32 bit so it doesn't matter anyway"
Basically, it's not important that we had to copy the other guys stuff and not offer it til almost a year later because nothing really important *cough*NON-microsoft*cough* runs 64 bit anyway. But we have it!! And the itanium had it a year ago! (was amusing how he threw that in too)
My coworker and i tried not to laugh out loud.
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