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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.
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How will it perform compared to AMD's chips? AFAIK AMD usually performs better clock to clock?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
HA-HA!
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.
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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?
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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?
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Yes. At least with AMD's implementation. I am not sure about Intel's. AMD64 runs x86-32 natively. IIRC there are two modes (one mode has 2 submodes). There is legacy mode, which is pure 32 bit x86 with standard registers, and then there is long mode which can either operate in legacy submode, which can run 64 bit code or 32 bit code, but is limited to 32 bit address space and registers, And then there is 64-bit mode which runs 64 bit code with all the added registers, but cannot run 32bit code.
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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.
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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."
"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!
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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.
"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.
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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
Exactly two cores on a single die is _better_ than SMT(aka. HyperThreading).
In theory it is also more expensive to produce, but with the K7/K8 design, implementing a multicore cpu is just so much less R&D than implementing HyperThreading, that AMD might easily sell multicore-CPUs in direct competion with Intel HT chips.
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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.
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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