Merced Design Completed

NoWhere Man writes "Merced's design is complete and are due to go into production mid-2000, but it is expected that McKinley, Merced's successor (due late 2000), will likely be the most popular in Intel's 64-bit chips. "

Comments

A few concerns with your arguments.

[Christopher Thomas]

Never, if the gaming companies have anything to do with it. As processors and memory become faster, games become more bloated and less well-written.

Um, no. New games require more hardware because they have fancier special effects and more detailed models. This is not really related to code complexity. It makes the _data_files_ larger, naturally, but that's about it.

Granted, there are some game writers who consider special effects a reasonable substitute for gameplay and plotting. These writers' games will sink, however, because consumers do want games that are actually fun to play.

Re. hardware vs. games, game hardware requirements will plateau when cheap hardware exists that can handle just about all of the special effects in the OpenGL feature set for photorealistic models at high resolution in real-time. Beyond that, there isn't anything left to add hardware load on the graphics side of things.

Things like AI and physics may continue to develop after that, but physics at least won't add much more load if you have hardware that powerful.

Added to that, processor design has become more bloated, moving deeper into a large, complex instruction set. Simpler processors, such as the ARM, outpaced the Intel chips even at a fraction of the clockspeed, because they were better designed.

Um, no. Look at just about any non-Intel processor. Intel chips are bloated because Intel continues to support and extend an instruction set that wasn't designed to be extensible. They're about the only major microprocessor manufacturer that made this mistake.

Also, didn't ARM not _have_ a floating-point unit? With more silicon to devote, of course they'll be faster at integer operations.

Finally, throw in that most modern OS' are bloated and top-heavy, Linux being one notable exception

And *BSD and BeOS and...

Microsoft is the primary culprit for slow OSs. This is because Microsoft is purely market-driven, and the market that they cater to would rather buy a new version of the OS with more features than a new version of the OS that works more efficiently.

OSs and chips can be designed cleanly - and _are_, with only a few exceptions. Take a look around at what's available, and you may be pleasantly surprised.

And what about the compilers?

[Kaa]

Merced family is heavily dependent for performance on paralellizing compilers. I suspect that making the silicon will be the easy part (I'm a software guy, hardware guys may disagree with that), but making good compilers to take advantage of the chip will be a bitch.

It seems that we are entering an era when the performance of your application is going to depend on the quality of your compiler/interpreter as much as on the actual hardware inside the machine. This is both good and scary. Good if the free compilers (like egcs) will be able to compete with and outperform commercial compilers -- that will be a great boost to free software. But there is also the scary part: if the free compilers fail to keep pace with commercial offerings, they will die. Think about it: if a kernel compiled under, say, Sun compiler will run twice as fast as one compiled under gcc, what will happen to gcc?


Kaa