Fortunately, we are sending more advanced Mars probes this year. NASA is launching two surface rovers to study the soil of Mars later this year; the European Space Agency (ESA) is launching Mars Express this summer, which will include a lander to look at Mars on the surface and an orbiter with a stereoscopic-view camera system to look at Mars surface features at resolutions down to almost 1,000 mm per pixel resolution.
In 2005, the very powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be able to resolve down to less than 400 mm visual and around 1,200 mm UV/IR resolution per pixel; at that resolution (which is not much bettered by our strategic reconnaissance satellites), we'll likely be able to finally settle the issue of anomalies on Mars and prove whether or not they're natural geological formations or something made by an intelligent civilization that once existed there.
Given the fact that Anandtech's web site showed pictures of motherboard prototypes that will use the Hammer-class CPU's like late last fall, I'm sure that prototype machines with the Athlon64/Opteron CPU's are already delivered to Microsoft by last fall so they can write a version of Windows XP Home/Professional and Windows 2003 Server that works in the x86-64 native mode.
My personal guess is that when the Athlon64 CPU is finally released commercially, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server versions that work with this CPU will be shipping also at the same time.
I think Microsoft will survive the 64-bit transition.
After all, Microsoft HAS developed a version of Windows XP Professional that works on the Itanium CPU in IA-64 mode, for gosh sakes! I'm sure that Microsoft is right now working a version of Windows XP Home/Professional that works on the AMD Athlon64/Opteron CPU's in x86-64 native mode, so when the Athlon64 is finally released an x86-64-native version of Windows XP will be available for these new machines.
The first one is pollution. This is very serious to us as people.
This used to be a serious problem in the past but with today's computer-controlled fuel-injection gasoline engines and modern exhaust emission controls they are VASTLY cleaner than gasoline engines of even 30 years ago! For example, the 2003 Honda Accord has available in California a gasoline engine so clean it has less than 1% of the harmful pollutant output of a gasoline engine dating from the 1970's.
The second is that oil isn't distributed fairly around the world. Some countries have it, others don't.
You're forgetting that oil extraction technology has advanced to the point that many oilfields that would have been impossible to tap just 20 years ago are now economically viable to exploit. There are massive oil reserves sitting out in the oceans; the only reason why we haven't exploited them is the daunting cost up until now to pumping out from ocean sites. Engineers from British Petroleum has estimated that there is enough oil sitting in the Gulf of Mexico to equal the entire Persian Gulf combined. Also, Canada has massively huge reserves of tar sands that could yield enough oil to also equal the entire Persian Gulf combined. There are potentially huge oilfields in the former Soviet Union that could be tapped--but not done so due to the extreme cold of Siberian winters. The only reason why the Persian Gulf is economically viable for oil production is the fact the oil there is very close to the surface and the weather is conducive to year-round production.
Better solution: apply hybrid drivetrain technology so instead of a gasoline engine you have a turbocharged diesel engine as part of the drivetrain system.
This may make it practical for a future variant of the new VW Touran Multi-Activity Vehicle (MAV) to get nearly the same fuel efficiency as the current high-efficiency version of the VW Lupo but with far better interior space available and performance you associate with regular Golf model.
However, diesels have one big downside: particulate emissions. However, with modern low-sulfur diesel fuels we can apply common-rail fuel delivery with direct injection and modern catalysts and particulate traps that eliminate this problem.
Imagine a hybrid drive system with a small turbodiesel engine and an electric motor; this may make it possible for a Volkswagen Golf-sized vehicle to get the same fuel efficiency as that special version of the Volkswagen Lupo now being sold in Germany!:-) (e.g., 3 liters fuel consumption per 100 kilometers travelled)
While the CPU may not implement Digital Rights Management, I have a BIG worry there may be backdoors in the CPU architecture that might allow the Chinese government to monitor Internet usage by end users with the appropriate monitoring program.
Far fetched? Given China's aversion to foreign web sites and the fact China is still an authoritarian government this very idea is not out of the question.
...Was the fact they far underestimated the performance of the ATI R300 chipset.
As originally intended, the GeForce FX chipset would have easily outpaced the Radeon 8500 series, but when ATI showed the Radeon 9700, it forced nVidia to do a crash program development to speed up the GeForce FX chipset as far as possible, which resulted in the card with its thermal cooling system akin to the Outside Thermal Exhaust System (OTES) pioneered by Abit for their overclocked GeForce4 Ti4200 cards. Unfortunately, the card ended up being quite noisy from the cooling system and its performance was not quite the Radeon 9700 equalizer nVidia had hoped.
Hopefully, nVidia has learned its lesson and the upcoming NV31 and NV34 chipsets will have higher performance without having to resort to a noisy oversized cooling system.
The only reason why we're so concerned about the Persian Gulf is the fact the oil there is technologically cheap to pump out of the ground.
You're forgetting that the former Soviet Union contains a lot of petroleum, only now being extensively tapped due to the access to American oil exploration expertise. We've only scratched the surface of the oil available on the Alaska North Slope. There are huge potential oil reserves off the coasts of the USA, not yet tapped due to environmental laws and technological costs. There are potential petroleum deposits in Xinjiang Province in western China that might be quite large indeed. The Spratley Islands west of the Philippines has potentially huge undersea oil reserves. And the tar sands in Canada contain potentially enough oil to equal all the oil in the Middle East combined.
With the right application of technology, we could increase known petroleum reserves many times what is currently found.
I think it truly is time that we start having humans live off this world permanently in space colonies.
Fortunately, mining the moon is a great way to build these space colonies like those proposed in the 1970's. We know that moon rocks contain aluminum, magnesium and titanium, all strategically-important metals and can be used in constructing space colonies. With nuclear-powered rockets, we might even eventually "capture" a small asteroid and mine that for space colony construction materials.
Eventually, Mars will be great place for human colonization. The fact that water is fairly common on that planet could mean it has the potential to support millions of colonists.
If we have the political will to pull it off, imagine by 2100 we could have perhaps hundreds of millions of humans living on the Moon, on space colony platforms floating between Earth and the Moon, and on Mars.
I am pretty sure that Nintendo is shopping around for a company that can make OLED displays at a reasonably price for a future variant of the Gameboy Advance.
Sure, it may end up making the unit cost US$150 instead of the current US$100, but I'm sure not a few users would love the brighter, clearer display of OLED compared to the current LCD display on the Gameboy Advance models.
The first company to commercialize OLED in TV displays, at a reasonable price, would be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
The first company that can make OLED's truly moisture-proof and can make them in 17 to 21 inch true diagonal sizes will truly making money hand over fist. Especially considering the fact OLED's are likely going to be several times cheaper than TFT LCD's.
I think TiVo won't have to worry until at least 5-6 years from now.
One of my suggestions for improving TiVo is once high-density re-writeable optical discs in DVD size passes 100 GB (which technically feasible within the next three years), instead of strong the actual TV program on a hard drive you have the stripped-down Linux OS and TiVo program code stored on a 20-30 GB hard drive, but the actual program itself it stored on a removeable optical disc. It is this technology that will finally consign VHS to permanent retirement.:-)
I even think it's possible by 2010 the DVD-sized rewriteable optical disc could store as much as one terabyte! That would make it possible to store many hours of even 1080i/720p 16:9 HDTV programming on one disc.
The Russians used the larger Proton rocket to launch components of Mir. Maybe we should pay the Russians to launch ISS components with more Proton rocket launches?
In my opinion, probably the best solution is to separate the manned flights and cargo flights into separate missions.
I would seriously look at developing a space plane like that proposed by Orbital Sciences; since it doesn't have to carry cargo or three big booster engines the space plane can be quite small (it should easily fit on top of the Delta IV Heavy rocket), yet still carry up to seven astronauts (2 crew and 5 passengers) to the ISS. Also, because the Delta IV Heavy can launch a substantial load to LEO, it could be adapted to carry future ISS components to orbit.
I think PC architecture is going to undergo some drastic speed improvements over the next 24 months--and that's not including the CPU.
Between faster chipsets, big increases in memory bandwidth (PC3200 DDR-SDRAM is only the beginning), and Serial ATA, you'll see overall faster computers anyway.
I think we can be confident that both ATI and nVidia know about the PCI Express spec and both companies will introduce graphics card design based on ATI's R350/R400 GPU's and nVidia NV3X GPU's by the fall of 2004.
It's sad in a way, but all things must come to an end. SMG has been working 80 hour weeks on it for 7 years now, since she was 19. No matter what you do or how much you get paid for it, that's gotta wear you out. Sure, the show made SMG the star she is, but she also made the show the star it is.
In my personal opinion, Ms. Gellar needs to take a break from the entertainment industry for at least two years. She is already past the point of being typecast, an issue that has ruined not a few acting careers in Hollywood, especially in television.
She's probably saved enough money to move to a smaller town far away from the entertainment industry, spend two years to get back a normal life, then start over again with a new TV series or new movie doing something completely different. That way, she can then be remembered for doing something significant in terms of acting besides Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.
The thing that hurt Windows 95/98/98SE on a Pentium Pro was the fact these are still in many ways 16/32-bit hybrid operating systems. No wonder why they weren't that great on Pentium Pro machines.
However, Windows NT and Windows 2000 definitely worked great on a Pentium Pro system if you had enough RAM installed. I've run Windows 2000 Professional on a Pentium Pro 200 MHz (256 KB L2 cache) system and its performance was actually quite good, mostly because the whole OS took advantage of the 32-bit optimizations on the PPro CPU.
Besides, the Pentium Pro CPU core became the basis for the Pentium II, Pentium III and pre-P4 core Celeron CPU's.
I have to disagree with your assessment about the Pentium CPU at the time it was introduced.
Remember, the Pentium CPU runs x86 architecture code natively, so it did not require an expensive starting-from-scratch mentality to take fully advantage of the CPU like you have to do with the Itanium CPU. In short, programs that ran on the 80486 CPU could run on the Pentium CPU with no modifications.
While the Itanium looks great on paper, the very fact you have to pretty much kibosh a large fraction of your legacy code (probably most of it!) to take full advantage of the CPU is going to make the CPU a long-term non-starter.
Yes, the Sun UltraSparc III isn't as fast, but at least with the UltraSparc III you can use the large base of legacy code written for the SPARC CPU architecture with little or no modification. The same applies to IBM's POWER architecture--there is a lot of legacy code that works on IBM's 64-bit POWER code base, not to mention the fact IBM has spent massive sums to money to port Linux and IBM mainframe OS'es over and create excellent POWER architecture programming tools. With both Sun and IBM unveiling next-generation SPARC and POWER architecture CPU's later this year, application programmers can use the code available NOW to create new applications that run on the new CPU designs pretty easily.
I think the problems with the Itanium boils down to this:
1. The CPU's are insanely expensive. They make the majority of x86-architecture Intel Xeon CPU's look like a bargain.
2. Where are the server applications that take advantage of the Itanium CPU? They're not exactly widely available, to say the least.
3. Programming for Itanium is still a somewhat iffy proposition.
Meanwhile, AMD's Athlon 64/Opteron offers these advantages:
1. The CPU will definitely NOT be insanely expensive to purchase.
2. Programming for the AMD x86-64 architecture is not going to require kiboshing a bunch of legacy programming tools and starting from scratch--it is a straightforward process to convert today's programming tools to take full advanratge of the x86-64 native mode.
3. Because the programming tools are so readily available, both operating systems and applications for the Athlon 64/Opteron will be available widely by the time the new AMD CPU's are finally released for sale. Already, UnitedLinux is porting Linux to run in x86-64 native mode, and Microsoft is very likely readying versions of Windows XP Home/Professional and Windows 2003 Server that will run in x86-64 native mode.
Meanwhile, Intel supposedly has a 64-bit x86-architecture CPU codenamed Yamhill that has developed. However, given we don't know how Yamhill implements 64-bit x86 instructions Intel will have to do some VERY serious convincing to Linux kernel programmers and to Microsoft to write Yamhill-native code--and Intel is far behind the AMD efforts.
Right now, Intel is really stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of going to 64-bit CPU's.
They could have gone to 64-bit extensions of the X86 architecture a LONG time ago, but let AMD get there first. Right now, UnitedLinux is working on an Athlon 64/Opteron 64-bit native version of Linux and very likely Microsoft is doing the same for Windows XP; Intel has yet to show the so-called Yamhill-core x86 CPU with 64-bit extensions, which means it's likely not even Microsoft knows how Intel's 64-bit x86 extensions work fully. That right there potentially puts Intel at a disadvantage because it takes lots of time to create an operating system to support Yamhill-compatible native mode, especially with the complexity of Windows XP and the increasing complexity of Linux kernels.
The Intel Itanium CPU is so different than the x86 architecture that to take full advantage of it you need a completely new set of programming tools to take advantage of it; programmers will have have to learn a lot of new things to eek out the performance advantages of the Itanium CPU. It is because of Itanium's almost-unique architecture that programs even on the server level to take advantage of the CPU are still not widely available.
If AMD can produce the Hammer technology CPU's reliably and on a large scale, they could end up having a HUGE leg up on Intel for some time.
What hurt the initial Pentium 4's was the fact they were limited to only 256 KB of on-die L2 cache--that really hurt the performance of the CPU compared to its AMD equivalents--let alone the Pentium III!
The Pentium 4 didn't really come into its own until the Northwood-core CPU's with its 512 KB of on-die L2 cache appeared and when software finally took full advantage of the SSE2 registers on the CPU.
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Fortunately, we are sending more advanced Mars probes this year. NASA is launching two surface rovers to study the soil of Mars later this year; the European Space Agency (ESA) is launching Mars Express this summer, which will include a lander to look at Mars on the surface and an orbiter with a stereoscopic-view camera system to look at Mars surface features at resolutions down to almost 1,000 mm per pixel resolution.
In 2005, the very powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be able to resolve down to less than 400 mm visual and around 1,200 mm UV/IR resolution per pixel; at that resolution (which is not much bettered by our strategic reconnaissance satellites), we'll likely be able to finally settle the issue of anomalies on Mars and prove whether or not they're natural geological formations or something made by an intelligent civilization that once existed there.
Given the fact that Anandtech's web site showed pictures of motherboard prototypes that will use the Hammer-class CPU's like late last fall, I'm sure that prototype machines with the Athlon64/Opteron CPU's are already delivered to Microsoft by last fall so they can write a version of Windows XP Home/Professional and Windows 2003 Server that works in the x86-64 native mode.
My personal guess is that when the Athlon64 CPU is finally released commercially, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server versions that work with this CPU will be shipping also at the same time.
I think Microsoft will survive the 64-bit transition.
After all, Microsoft HAS developed a version of Windows XP Professional that works on the Itanium CPU in IA-64 mode, for gosh sakes! I'm sure that Microsoft is right now working a version of Windows XP Home/Professional that works on the AMD Athlon64/Opteron CPU's in x86-64 native mode, so when the Athlon64 is finally released an x86-64-native version of Windows XP will be available for these new machines.
The first one is pollution. This is very serious to us as people.
This used to be a serious problem in the past but with today's computer-controlled fuel-injection gasoline engines and modern exhaust emission controls they are VASTLY cleaner than gasoline engines of even 30 years ago! For example, the 2003 Honda Accord has available in California a gasoline engine so clean it has less than 1% of the harmful pollutant output of a gasoline engine dating from the 1970's.
The second is that oil isn't distributed fairly around the world. Some countries have it, others don't.
You're forgetting that oil extraction technology has advanced to the point that many oilfields that would have been impossible to tap just 20 years ago are now economically viable to exploit. There are massive oil reserves sitting out in the oceans; the only reason why we haven't exploited them is the daunting cost up until now to pumping out from ocean sites. Engineers from British Petroleum has estimated that there is enough oil sitting in the Gulf of Mexico to equal the entire Persian Gulf combined. Also, Canada has massively huge reserves of tar sands that could yield enough oil to also equal the entire Persian Gulf combined. There are potentially huge oilfields in the former Soviet Union that could be tapped--but not done so due to the extreme cold of Siberian winters. The only reason why the Persian Gulf is economically viable for oil production is the fact the oil there is very close to the surface and the weather is conducive to year-round production.
Better solution: apply hybrid drivetrain technology so instead of a gasoline engine you have a turbocharged diesel engine as part of the drivetrain system.
This may make it practical for a future variant of the new VW Touran Multi-Activity Vehicle (MAV) to get nearly the same fuel efficiency as the current high-efficiency version of the VW Lupo but with far better interior space available and performance you associate with regular Golf model.
However, diesels have one big downside: particulate emissions. However, with modern low-sulfur diesel fuels we can apply common-rail fuel delivery with direct injection and modern catalysts and particulate traps that eliminate this problem.
:-) (e.g., 3 liters fuel consumption per 100 kilometers travelled)
Imagine a hybrid drive system with a small turbodiesel engine and an electric motor; this may make it possible for a Volkswagen Golf-sized vehicle to get the same fuel efficiency as that special version of the Volkswagen Lupo now being sold in Germany!
While the CPU may not implement Digital Rights Management, I have a BIG worry there may be backdoors in the CPU architecture that might allow the Chinese government to monitor Internet usage by end users with the appropriate monitoring program.
Far fetched? Given China's aversion to foreign web sites and the fact China is still an authoritarian government this very idea is not out of the question.
...Was the fact they far underestimated the performance of the ATI R300 chipset.
As originally intended, the GeForce FX chipset would have easily outpaced the Radeon 8500 series, but when ATI showed the Radeon 9700, it forced nVidia to do a crash program development to speed up the GeForce FX chipset as far as possible, which resulted in the card with its thermal cooling system akin to the Outside Thermal Exhaust System (OTES) pioneered by Abit for their overclocked GeForce4 Ti4200 cards. Unfortunately, the card ended up being quite noisy from the cooling system and its performance was not quite the Radeon 9700 equalizer nVidia had hoped.
Hopefully, nVidia has learned its lesson and the upcoming NV31 and NV34 chipsets will have higher performance without having to resort to a noisy oversized cooling system.
We're a LONG way from running out of oil.
The only reason why we're so concerned about the Persian Gulf is the fact the oil there is technologically cheap to pump out of the ground.
You're forgetting that the former Soviet Union contains a lot of petroleum, only now being extensively tapped due to the access to American oil exploration expertise. We've only scratched the surface of the oil available on the Alaska North Slope. There are huge potential oil reserves off the coasts of the USA, not yet tapped due to environmental laws and technological costs. There are potential petroleum deposits in Xinjiang Province in western China that might be quite large indeed. The Spratley Islands west of the Philippines has potentially huge undersea oil reserves. And the tar sands in Canada contain potentially enough oil to equal all the oil in the Middle East combined.
With the right application of technology, we could increase known petroleum reserves many times what is currently found.
I think it truly is time that we start having humans live off this world permanently in space colonies.
Fortunately, mining the moon is a great way to build these space colonies like those proposed in the 1970's. We know that moon rocks contain aluminum, magnesium and titanium, all strategically-important metals and can be used in constructing space colonies. With nuclear-powered rockets, we might even eventually "capture" a small asteroid and mine that for space colony construction materials.
Eventually, Mars will be great place for human colonization. The fact that water is fairly common on that planet could mean it has the potential to support millions of colonists.
If we have the political will to pull it off, imagine by 2100 we could have perhaps hundreds of millions of humans living on the Moon, on space colony platforms floating between Earth and the Moon, and on Mars.
I am pretty sure that Nintendo is shopping around for a company that can make OLED displays at a reasonably price for a future variant of the Gameboy Advance.
Sure, it may end up making the unit cost US$150 instead of the current US$100, but I'm sure not a few users would love the brighter, clearer display of OLED compared to the current LCD display on the Gameboy Advance models.
The first company to commercialize OLED in TV displays, at a reasonable price, would be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
The first company that can make OLED's truly moisture-proof and can make them in 17 to 21 inch true diagonal sizes will truly making money hand over fist. Especially considering the fact OLED's are likely going to be several times cheaper than TFT LCD's.
I think TiVo won't have to worry until at least 5-6 years from now.
:-)
One of my suggestions for improving TiVo is once high-density re-writeable optical discs in DVD size passes 100 GB (which technically feasible within the next three years), instead of strong the actual TV program on a hard drive you have the stripped-down Linux OS and TiVo program code stored on a 20-30 GB hard drive, but the actual program itself it stored on a removeable optical disc. It is this technology that will finally consign VHS to permanent retirement.
I even think it's possible by 2010 the DVD-sized rewriteable optical disc could store as much as one terabyte! That would make it possible to store many hours of even 1080i/720p 16:9 HDTV programming on one disc.
The Russians used the larger Proton rocket to launch components of Mir. Maybe we should pay the Russians to launch ISS components with more Proton rocket launches?
In my opinion, probably the best solution is to separate the manned flights and cargo flights into separate missions.
I would seriously look at developing a space plane like that proposed by Orbital Sciences; since it doesn't have to carry cargo or three big booster engines the space plane can be quite small (it should easily fit on top of the Delta IV Heavy rocket), yet still carry up to seven astronauts (2 crew and 5 passengers) to the ISS. Also, because the Delta IV Heavy can launch a substantial load to LEO, it could be adapted to carry future ISS components to orbit.
I think PC architecture is going to undergo some drastic speed improvements over the next 24 months--and that's not including the CPU.
Between faster chipsets, big increases in memory bandwidth (PC3200 DDR-SDRAM is only the beginning), and Serial ATA, you'll see overall faster computers anyway.
I think we can be confident that both ATI and nVidia know about the PCI Express spec and both companies will introduce graphics card design based on ATI's R350/R400 GPU's and nVidia NV3X GPU's by the fall of 2004.
It's sad in a way, but all things must come to an end. SMG has been working 80 hour weeks on it for 7 years now, since she was 19. No matter what you do or how much you get paid for it, that's gotta wear you out. Sure, the show made SMG the star she is, but she also made the show the star it is.
In my personal opinion, Ms. Gellar needs to take a break from the entertainment industry for at least two years. She is already past the point of being typecast, an issue that has ruined not a few acting careers in Hollywood, especially in television.
She's probably saved enough money to move to a smaller town far away from the entertainment industry, spend two years to get back a normal life, then start over again with a new TV series or new movie doing something completely different. That way, she can then be remembered for doing something significant in terms of acting besides Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.
The thing that hurt Windows 95/98/98SE on a Pentium Pro was the fact these are still in many ways 16/32-bit hybrid operating systems. No wonder why they weren't that great on Pentium Pro machines.
However, Windows NT and Windows 2000 definitely worked great on a Pentium Pro system if you had enough RAM installed. I've run Windows 2000 Professional on a Pentium Pro 200 MHz (256 KB L2 cache) system and its performance was actually quite good, mostly because the whole OS took advantage of the 32-bit optimizations on the PPro CPU.
Besides, the Pentium Pro CPU core became the basis for the Pentium II, Pentium III and pre-P4 core Celeron CPU's.
However, have you seen the pricing for Itanium CPU's? They run into several thousand dollars just for one CPU depending on model.
It makes even the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz part look like a downright bargain in comparison.
Small wonder why both Sun and Linus Torvalds have dismissed this chip.
I have to disagree with your assessment about the Pentium CPU at the time it was introduced.
Remember, the Pentium CPU runs x86 architecture code natively, so it did not require an expensive starting-from-scratch mentality to take fully advantage of the CPU like you have to do with the Itanium CPU. In short, programs that ran on the 80486 CPU could run on the Pentium CPU with no modifications.
While the Itanium looks great on paper, the very fact you have to pretty much kibosh a large fraction of your legacy code (probably most of it!) to take full advantage of the CPU is going to make the CPU a long-term non-starter.
Yes, the Sun UltraSparc III isn't as fast, but at least with the UltraSparc III you can use the large base of legacy code written for the SPARC CPU architecture with little or no modification. The same applies to IBM's POWER architecture--there is a lot of legacy code that works on IBM's 64-bit POWER code base, not to mention the fact IBM has spent massive sums to money to port Linux and IBM mainframe OS'es over and create excellent POWER architecture programming tools. With both Sun and IBM unveiling next-generation SPARC and POWER architecture CPU's later this year, application programmers can use the code available NOW to create new applications that run on the new CPU designs pretty easily.
I think the problems with the Itanium boils down to this:
1. The CPU's are insanely expensive. They make the majority of x86-architecture Intel Xeon CPU's look like a bargain.
2. Where are the server applications that take advantage of the Itanium CPU? They're not exactly widely available, to say the least.
3. Programming for Itanium is still a somewhat iffy proposition.
Meanwhile, AMD's Athlon 64/Opteron offers these advantages:
1. The CPU will definitely NOT be insanely expensive to purchase.
2. Programming for the AMD x86-64 architecture is not going to require kiboshing a bunch of legacy programming tools and starting from scratch--it is a straightforward process to convert today's programming tools to take full advanratge of the x86-64 native mode.
3. Because the programming tools are so readily available, both operating systems and applications for the Athlon 64/Opteron will be available widely by the time the new AMD CPU's are finally released for sale. Already, UnitedLinux is porting Linux to run in x86-64 native mode, and Microsoft is very likely readying versions of Windows XP Home/Professional and Windows 2003 Server that will run in x86-64 native mode.
Meanwhile, Intel supposedly has a 64-bit x86-architecture CPU codenamed Yamhill that has developed. However, given we don't know how Yamhill implements 64-bit x86 instructions Intel will have to do some VERY serious convincing to Linux kernel programmers and to Microsoft to write Yamhill-native code--and Intel is far behind the AMD efforts.
Right now, Intel is really stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of going to 64-bit CPU's.
They could have gone to 64-bit extensions of the X86 architecture a LONG time ago, but let AMD get there first. Right now, UnitedLinux is working on an Athlon 64/Opteron 64-bit native version of Linux and very likely Microsoft is doing the same for Windows XP; Intel has yet to show the so-called Yamhill-core x86 CPU with 64-bit extensions, which means it's likely not even Microsoft knows how Intel's 64-bit x86 extensions work fully. That right there potentially puts Intel at a disadvantage because it takes lots of time to create an operating system to support Yamhill-compatible native mode, especially with the complexity of Windows XP and the increasing complexity of Linux kernels.
The Intel Itanium CPU is so different than the x86 architecture that to take full advantage of it you need a completely new set of programming tools to take advantage of it; programmers will have have to learn a lot of new things to eek out the performance advantages of the Itanium CPU. It is because of Itanium's almost-unique architecture that programs even on the server level to take advantage of the CPU are still not widely available.
If AMD can produce the Hammer technology CPU's reliably and on a large scale, they could end up having a HUGE leg up on Intel for some time.
What hurt the initial Pentium 4's was the fact they were limited to only 256 KB of on-die L2 cache--that really hurt the performance of the CPU compared to its AMD equivalents--let alone the Pentium III!
The Pentium 4 didn't really come into its own until the Northwood-core CPU's with its 512 KB of on-die L2 cache appeared and when software finally took full advantage of the SSE2 registers on the CPU.