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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."
Is this the slight amount of force needed to budge the processor tug-of-war?
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
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?
Buy Intel, Buy Quality.
Don't you mean Bye, Intel. Buy Quality.
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.
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
... 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?
I for one am glad to see Intel recognizing that they are no longer the only game in town.
If the world works like I believe it should, the competition between Intel and AMD will provide consumers with better products at lower prices.
Sure, AMD is ahead right now. There is incompatibility between the two 64 bit architectures, and developers may choose to design for one or the other. But the Intel FAQ is right in that Intel processors support SSE3 and HyperThreading, for which AMD has no counterpart. This is in addition to Intel performance-enhancing compilers. If developers choose to develop around Intel's 64 Bit processor, then AMD may soon find itself behind again.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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.
I love it. The slashad in this story for me was SGI's pushing their Altix on Itanium2!
HA-HA!
with a x86-64 can i run every software writted for a i386 cpu type?
\n.\n
Sure, you can't build a $1500 Itanium box, but at the same time, the second fastest computer in the world is powered by Itanium processors. So is the fifth. AMD Opterons power #17.
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.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
in early 2005 Anandtech
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.
Intel's been talking about this for some time, and it's been posted on /. numerous occasions.
I guess we're trying to paint them with a bad brush, just because. I don't see anything quiet about it.
Do you mean quiet as in they aren't saturating the market with bullshit about how much more amazing the internet will be with 64 bit extensions and other nonsense claims designed to sucker the technically illiterate into upgrading for no reason?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Uh, dual cores on a single die?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yeah Let me see which one the gray unwashed masses is going to pick.
The one supported by MS's Windows or the one that is not?
The one that came out first and by 1Q2005 will have dual processors on chip or the one that will have same arriving one years later?
The one that has a memorable name that is fast catching on AMD64 or the one called
SomethingOrOther-64-notquitesurewhatwewillstickint heend?
Hard question indeed.
Help fight continental drift.
One would think that Intel, better than anyone else, should know one simple fact about the computer universe:
Try as you might, you just can't get rid of x86.
RISC vendors failed. Intel's own RISC efforts failed. Itanium is an overengineered design that nobody wants. What did they think was going to happen?
In the world of computers, especially PC type computers, backwards compatibility is king. That's what keeps incumbents like Intel and (especially) Microsoft on top. You'd think they'd know this better than anyone else. Has AMD beaten Intel at its own game? Time will tell.
Look on the bright side: the complete failure of Itanium in the marketplace (let's call it what it is, even though Intel hasn't officially thrown in the towel yet) means that we won't be stuck with an entire generation of computing where Intel calls the shots. Can you imagine what would have happened if Itanium prevailed and nobody else was allowed to produce a compatible processor?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
single core on a single die?
Wha ha ha ha ha that's HT for you.
Did I mention that your Compy sees 2 cores for the price of one? What a bargain!
(its meant to be funny)
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
So does anyone know what Intel left out of their AMD-64 (Intel will hate that reference) instruction set implementation?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Perhaps I am over reacting, but this is huge. AMD use to fight to keep with Intel, and now *Intel* is playing catch up.
...Michael...
AMD may soon be in a spot to dictate processor advances and even bus specifications. This could have siginicant impact for future PC's.
What's next? Microsoft losing the desktop?!?!
I now wish I would have held on to my AMD stock!
Where would the car industry, and the American economy, be if we had headlines like "GM Quietly Adopts Ford's Gascap Diameter"? These interoperability issues might make short-term profits for Intel, and offer marketdroid simplified lockin strategies, but they're inefficient limits to scaling the market to encompass everyone. So longterm profits are sacrificed, as well as usability. This fruit of the Intel/AMD crosslicense agreements should be congratulated and promoted as a "best practice" that's best for everyone touched by the industry - which is practically everyone.
--
make install -not war
I got my AMD64 @ 3200+ 2 months ago. It was time for a new system and in the past I would of gone with Intel but preformance and price drove me to AMD. And I wanted to be ready for win64 and when VMware has better support for 64bit on linux *waits...*
:)
as a side note if anyone is woundering no problems really just minor little things in games (WC3 has a colour problem in the mini-map) everything else i've used is damn fast
also when making a p4 3.4ghz for a friend at the same time as my system, he went with a 7200rpm hdd I went with a 10 000rpm sata hdd and it was worth every penny. I'm sure we all know how the hdd seems to be the bottle neck now.
It was only a matter of time for them to use AMD's extention. Common now, why would they want to have 2 different 64-bit extentions on the market competing. This would just be extremely annoying to developers and such. On top of that, AMD's has been out now for quite a while, so trying to jump into the market NOW with their own wouldn't be very smart ...
Thats my 2 dollars...
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/
or was it when they started shipping 64 bit Prescotts?5 &tid=118&tid=137&tid=126
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/06/00025
Just because it shows up on the Register it is now news again.
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."
I like how theres an ad for Itanium2 processors on the slashdot article links for HP and Microsoft not supporting Itanium. :P
"Intel® EM64T is one of a number of platform innovations Intel is delivering"
So... copying somebody else is "innovation". So that's the definition Microsoft has been using all these years!
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Talk about old stuff. Man slashdot is getting behind. This stuff was anounced at Intel's development conference in like April.
So much for "quiet"...
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.
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.
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
At least this story duplicates another that is more than five days old ... congratulations, I guess
/ 136230 3 9
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/09
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/21/16422
You mean the "rumors" aren't officially "news" until they appear on /.? Forget what we've been reading since Febuary on http://www.anandtech.com, http://www.tomshardware.com, http://www.theinquirer.net, http://www.arstechnica.com, http://www.hardocp.com, http://www.aceshardware.com, and of course http://www.intel.com, it's not true until it appears on /. ...
/.'s FP.
PSSST!!! I've heard the rumor that Apple is planning on ditching Motorola's chips for IBM processors in their upcoming Macintoshes. Has anyone elseo heard about something called a "G5"? Some say it might also be 64 bit? Heavens-to-Betsy, let's post it to
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
"How will it perform compared to AMD's chips? AFAIK AMD usually performs better clock to clock?"
Comparing processors "clock for clock" has never meant a lot, and is meaning less and less all the time. Different designs do things so differently that clock rate has about as much to do with actual performance as the color of the chip package.
The best measure of CPU performance remains the price/performance ratio. That is, for a given amount of money, how fast will a CPU perform a given task? In other words, how much bang for the buck. AMD has consistantly been beating Intel in that department for years. Sure, you might find a chip from Intel that is 10% faster, but it will cost you 80% more.
Even comparing price/performance on just CPUs has become difficult to impossible. Core logic (especially the memory subsystem and periperal bus) have become so important, and so differentiated, that establishing an apples-to-apples CPU comparison is hard. So instead of comparing just CPUs, you have to compare CPU/chipset/memory combinations.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
The Intel guy has a point. Most people have no use for a 64-bit address space, at least for right now. Indeed, increasing the address space can actually slow things down.
It is only the fact that the AMD64/x86-64/whatever design also happens to add more general purpose registers that makes it useful for every day computing. Of course, you can have more registers without having a 64-bit address space, but that's too complex for most people. So "64-bit is better" wins out.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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
HyperThreading is quite different from a dual-core chip.
HT is more like dual-pipeline but still only one arithmetic units (and some other executions unit).
So when your first pipeline is stalled you maybe able to use the free cycles for the second pipeline.
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
The once-dominant and still-superior 64 bit Alpha processor architecture (which is unfortunately now owned by Intel) has also been suffering a decreasing market interest under Intel's evil and terminal stewardship.
After Intel bought the rival Alpha technology, perhaps they should have phased out the Pentium instead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All recent (around 2 months) servers we've
been getting from HPaq, with 3.4 GHz Xeons, are all 64 bit capable. SuSE SLES 9 even says on install "you are installing 32 bit software on a 64 bit computer".
By that reasoning, a Civic has better "performance" than a Porsche, because it can go half as fast as the Ferrari, but only costs 1/5 as much.
All chip makers (yes, even AMD) charge a premium for their fastest chips. If you want a chip that's 10% faster, you'll usually pay more than 10% extra. And there are people who are willing to pay that, either to impress their friends or because the extra speed improvement is actually useful to them.
...remember when he claimed to have a Ph.D?
...like price/performance.
sure you can get faster intel chips, but you will pay far more for the privilege.
price/performance, amd completely wastes intel on all levels.
You work for Intel, right?
The Itanic has been sinking for a long time, even if you won't admit it. Denying it just makes it funnier for the people watching the wreck.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the Itanium is a bad chip; it performs very well at certain things. I'm just saying it's an overall failure.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Um but the amd64 can run 32-bit code [and 16-bit code] in full speed without "emulation layers" like the ia64 does. Sure the amd64 does more than an 8086 does but it still does what an 8086 does [and more].
Hell, everytime you boot an amd64 into winxp you're basically starting up a glorified 32-bit cpu with zero 64-bit extensions.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That's 640kb, you insensitive clod!
These super computers are nice for bragging rights, but they are only a very small fraction of what makes a chip successful or not.
It's like claiming that a car make is better than the other because it's top of the line model is good. If they sell 200 of those a year, it's only a PR asset. You have to look at what people are actually using.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Note that currently the architecture supports 48 bits of addressing (see the wikipedia, though you'll have to do your own calculations to figure it out (256 terabytes = 2^48).
I figure we'll exhaust that probably sometime around 2028 or so (doubling memory requirements each 18 months). I may be approaching retirement age by then, but statistically am likely to still be alive.
It may be possible to extend the architecture to support full 64-bit addressing, however, which would be likely to do us for almost another 50 years from now.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Inside a few Dell PowerEdge servers. Of course Dell gets first dibs since they're the only major manufacturer who is Intel-only...
Intel® Celeron® processor, 325J, 2.53GHz, 256KB Cache, 533MHz FSB
Intel® Pentium®4 processor, 520, 2.8GHz, 1MB Cache, 800MHz FSB [add $99]
Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, 3.4GHz,1MB Cache,800MHz FSB, EM64T [add $249]
Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, 3.6GHz,1MB Cache,800MHz FSB, EM64T [add $349]
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
One day, soon...
we will all look back on thes AMD vs Intel arguments and find them quaintly silly, since the two companies will have merged to try to stave off tremendous competition from cheap Chinese processors.
You know I'm right.
I think why it is a story is that this is the first time Intel is shipping in their "normal" processors as opposed to their expensive processors.
All the main processors (2.4 GHz upwards with HT) now have this available as opposed to before where it was Xeon or Extreme Edition only which were >$1000.
All I can say is that I wouldn't buy a PC without 64 bit extensions now...
It's much worse than that, unfortunately. The bounce buffers must be allocated in the low memory (below 4G for sure), and the only way to ensure that is to allocate them at boot time. Linux kernel does it with the SWIOTLB buffer. You can specify the size at boot, but after that it's fixed. If DMA ever requests more memory than the buffer has, the kernel will panic (apparently latest 2.6 kernels have some more graceful way to handle it, but in any case DMA requests cannot be fulfilled once there is no memory for bounce buffers). On the other hand, SWIOTLB memory effectively disappears from the system.
So, if you have a nice gaming system with 256MB video card, you may need at least that much memory just for bounce buffers, or more: I'm not sure what the exact requirements are, but I've seen EM64T boxes which would be stable only if SWIOTLB is twice the size of video RAM. Half a gig of RAM not available to the system. So at least for gaming boxes, buy AMD64, don't buy EM64T.
I'm not offering any. At the same time, let's not laud AMD for slapping some 64 bit registers on somebody elses design. I'm just saying that I'm puzzled by the pro-AMD groupthink.
It's hard to call an Opteron an x86 chip. More accurately it's a superset of the x86 archtecture.
Kinda like how the 80286 is a superset of the 8086.... and the 80386 is a superset of the 80286.....and how the Pentium MMX is a superset of the 80386.... and how SSE makes the..... get the drift?
Opteron is an x86 chip. It's just been too long since we've had a 286-to-386 scale change in the architecture.
The bounce buffer is only if you want to DMA data from above 4GB down to the 32 bit range the card sits at, no?
Since you have 4 GB of address space that the 32 bit card can get to, the worst case to me would be if you have around 4GB or more in a system. In this case you'd have to waste some of your RAM in the 32 bit region for the bounce buffer.
Otherwise, say you have a 256MB of RAM and a 256MB video card. You can simply have your video card reside at the 256-512MB memory region.
I'm probably missing something...check my work.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
WE MUST NOT HAVE A BIT GAP!!!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
I think Intel is quietly adding support for the x86-64 architecture due to the fact that Microsoft will soon release a version of Windows XP that will fully support the x86-64 architecture. I believe that the target ship date of this new release is some time in the first quarter of calendar year 2005.
That 268 435 456 megabytes, if read from address 0 to the end, would take 3.034 DAYS to finish at 1 GIGABYTE per second.
Damn, that is a lot of memory
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
SSL has it's performance double when using 64 bit. That's one common application that anyone will find useful, besides the greater registers and increased memory space available for applications and operating system both.
Us gamers are already looking to 64 bit. I think Microsoft might be right about 2005 being it's year of implementation. Of course, that is assuming they ever ship 64 bit windows!!
Their 64 bit architecture is Itanium, and that's not in desktops yet. Prescott & other EM64T-enabled chips are "32 bit chips with 64 bit extensions" - hence their terminology of IA-32e. It's just a normal 32 bit architecture with some 64 bit address & data registers bolted on and a few new instructions to access them, not a real 64 bit architecture.
So by that logic, I figure that Prescott is really a 4 bit CPU, with extensions...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
AMD64 will never be adoped by Intel. em64t is ridiculous. IA-32e is equally stupid and misleading to boot. x86-64 is too long. Why not just say x64? The x has become associated with x86 so it's easy to tell what we're referring to. It also makes it painfully obvious that this is the successor to x86 instead of the Itanic's IA64 architecture.
Actually yeah, it should be enough for anybody. I mean I don't think anyone will have a computer with more than 1.85 * 10 ^ 19 bytes of RAM for a while.
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
okay, agreed. the adequacy.org link was a bit obscure. It had a blurb about how AMD chips would turn your son into an evil hacker and so I went with it. 'Cus it's funny, see? Okay, maybe not.
Still, though... flamebait? Of all days I choose to post, I do it on the day that Jerry Sanders gets mod points. Damnit!
Yes, they could make it so that SWIOTLB is not needed when you have less than 4G RAM, but, unfortunately, it's not done this way. I really wish it was, nay be future Linux kernels will change this. But SWIOTLB is always used on EM64T systems, so the problem is not for folks with over 4GB of RAM, it's for those with 1GB of RAM and 256MG video card.
As far as having the card reside at 256-512MB memory region, that's exactly what bounce buffers do. The problem is, once you allow kernel to give out memory from that region to other applications, there is no way to get it back, so the only safe way is to hoard this region in case DMA ever needs it.
I can't help but feel smug about this. Intel stood on the sidelines saying
"Oh you don't NEED 64 bits and please note how we have more mhz"
while AMD was actually doing something and said
"Well, you know, 64 is TWO TIMES 32, and you can get some RIGHT HERE."
Intel roadmap:
1. Whine
2. Bitch
3. Moan
4. Conform
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
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...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Microsoft are pushing the AMD architecture now. They want people to be running 64-bit in two years' time, and they're not talking about Itanium 2. Intel themselves have admitted that Itanium 2 is now only aimed at big iron, as it was a flop in the desktop and standard server markets.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
As I understand it, initial dual-core AMD64 chips will have dual caches feeding off the same single or dual RAM channels previously accommodating a single-core chip. With half as much memory bandwidth available per core, does that imply more frequent pipeline stalls and therefore more benefit from SMT?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Intel did overlook one important aspect. They do not honor the NX bit. AMD Opterons and AMD64 CPUs do. That is one very big difference for alot of people.
We all remember how cumbersome memory segmentation was when programming under DOS/Win16. 4GB(?) segments may be less a kludge than 64K ones, but what's the point to go down that route when you can code in flat space under x86-64?
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Do you have it in standard units like Libraries of Congress, 'Trips to the moon and back if each bit was a penny and each penny piled' or light years of volkswagen-length?
;)
Bonus marks will be awarded for a statement in terms of lengths of string.
Also, were you counting big endian or little endian?
alpha - belongs to HPQ (hp+compaq)
amd64 - AMD
arm - Intel
hppa - HPQ
i386, ia64 - Intel
m68k - Motorola
mips, mipsel - MIPS
powerpc - IBM/Motorola/Apple
sparc - Sun
s390 - IBM
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You can be a genius in the computing field by merely reading old papers and re-implementing their ideas. Most people don't read the literature. Save your brain cycles for inventing stuff that's really new. Stand on the feet of giants!
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.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Don't generalize. Just because *you* can't do something or understand something doesn't similarly constrain the rest of us. So you may not be able to tell by looking at a die photo, but others who know what to look for can definitely tell. For a good example, go look at Hans DeVries excellent ChipArchitect website, specifically; http://chip-architect.com/news/2003_04_20_Looking_ at_Intels_Prescott_part2.html
He also has an awesome analysis of the AMD chips.
Ian Ameline
It's also approximately 7.5 years of DVD-quality video (based on 4 gigs an hour, 24/7). In memory.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
It's Intel's fault for not naming their chips ending in '86' any more. You can say 8086 assember or 80386 assembler and people will know what you mean... the 64-bit version ought to be called an 'i786' or something, but Intel marketing decided to drop the numbers after the 486.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
There is still difference between EM64T (Intel's x86-64 implementation) and AMD64. EM64T was derived from the long-time undisclosed project, codenamed as Yamhill. From sources I have read (x-bit labs? could not remember), Intel actually reverse-engineered AMD's CPU and AMD's early-openly development documents to get Yamhill to work. But in AMD's document, AMD made a mistake of leaving one instruction out of documents. However, Intel followed this mistake. So EM64T lacks one instruction that AMD64 has. But since this instruction is almost for internal use, such difference is not critical.
Why there is no yet another case?
AMD did reverse-engineering before to 386, 486 and Pentium before (AMD and Intel had filed case for this). And they two are all messed with numerous cross-license after so many years' R&D, manufacture and acquisition. So any case is just wasting and results in lose-lose case.
I just felt shame for Intel the whhole process of rolling out EM64T. Hope both of them can be honest. As consumer, let us enjoy more price-cutting.
>>LEAFyoung