AMD64 Preview 290
Araxen writes "Over at Anandtech.com they have an interesting preview of AMD's 64 bit processor on a Nforce3 mobo. The results are very impressive with the Anthlon64 beating out Intel's P4 best processor soundly in their gaming benchmarks. This was only in 32-bit mode no less! I can't wait for 64-bit benchmarks come out!"
Intel (Score:0, Interesting)
~S
Re:Idiots... (Score:3, Interesting)
Will it be secure? (Score:5, Interesting)
And when are some of these new processors going to be fully virtualizable? I'm talking about PUSHF and POPF generating exceptions like directly setting the interrupt flag does.
Think how easy plex86 would be to run on a processor that did this properly?
Code-morphing Transmeta (come one!), AMD (maybe?) Intel (no chance?)
Sam
About 64-bit gaming performance (Score:2, Interesting)
The above seems to imply that game benchmark results will be better at 64-bit. Now, if those games needed access to many gigabytes of game data, that would be an entirely correct assumption.
Apart from the utter pointlessness of 64-bit gaming for the coming years because of the comparatively humble data requirements of current games, a benchmark of 64-bit gaming performance (say, its 3D calculation or its AI plotting performance) would be mostly a waste of time, as you would see very likely only see an equalling performance at best.
Athlon64 will be in short supply (Score:5, Interesting)
But is it representative? (Score:2, Interesting)
While true, isn't the whole point of this "preview" to demonstrate the true Athlon64 performance without breaking the NDA by actually publishing Athlon64 benchmarks?
I'm guessing they have access to Athlon64 hardware, and simply "tweaked" the Opteron until ut produced similar enough results to be published as a "preview" -- Since those can be published. It's almost a little like what AMD did with their PR rating, which is officially based on the Thunderbird line, but everyone compare it to the P4 core freq. instead.
But yes, we have no idea of knowing how accurate these results reflect the final Athlon64 3200+ or whatever model they're previewing (am I the only person who got several pages without content in the preview?)
(everything above is pure conjecture)
Re:Intel's response (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way, did you know Prescott, along with its mobile version Dothan, was delayed because it was dissipating almost 103 watts? For the record, Opteron is dissipating about 60 watts.
Marcos
Re:About 64-bit gaming performance (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:64bit performance gains... (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought I remembered SPARC being able to do this, but it looks like [sun.com] SPARC programs must be compiled with 64 bit pointers to efficiently perform 64 bit arithmetic.
Re:Opteron Benchmarks, not Athlon 64 (Score:3, Interesting)
For comparison, the 1.8GHz Opterons are in the $460 range on Pricewatch [pricewatch.com]. So the A64's will have to be somewhat lower than that in price. (Unless they skip 1.8 altogether)
Also, for many benchmarks, dual-channel memory isn't that important. What is most important with the A64's (and Opterons) for desktop application speed is the on-chip memory controller. This gives these chips dramatically lower latency. So, we can still expect the low end A64's to be good in many, many applications - including games, I think.
Re:Not an Athlon64, but an Opteron (Score:3, Interesting)
http://tinyurl.com/mhn9
You can also find it in PriceWatch, at least 5 vendors offer it currently.
Re:About 64-bit gaming performance (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM had a RISC chip called the 801 way the hell back in time but never commercialized it, and so the ARM was the first RISC CPU that anyone was able to buy. I went hunting for dates once and wrote this writeup on E2 [everything2.net] which has the dates of these assorted processors. The 801 is from 1979, the ARM2 in 1985 (ARM1 is also in 1985, but never commercialized) and ROMP in 1986. POWER happened in 1990. There is enough time between 801 and ROMP, and further enough time between ROMP and POWER, to ensure that each processor somehow advanced the others, if only because IBM was busy laying their share of the groundwork for how RISC processors and processors in general would work. IBM has always advanced the science of computer technology by at least their fair share, if not more.
Other interesting factoids for those too lazy to visit the link, or to wait for the page to load, though probably anyone who has drilled down this far will fire it up in another tab or window; The Motorola 68020 (1984) was the first 32 bit processor. The first general-purpose 16 bit microprocessor was the Texas Instruments TMS9900 [xgistor.ath.cx] in the TI 99/4(A), in 1976.
I know about AIX on the RT, I know that was the primary OS, but the fact is that the system tanked because it was mismarketed as a PC, though it's true it was priced like one, scaled up for performance. I managed to track down both AOS and BSD 4.3 (IBM and not IBM, as you apparently know) for my RTs.
Will we have a library nightmare? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, those running other existing 64-bit CPUs should be able to give some advice.
Re:64bit performance gains... (Score:2, Interesting)
Besides, as compiler writers, we don't have the luxury to tell application developers to "just redesign your code".
Forget the linkage complaint, it's bogus. I was thinking of a different parameter-related problem that is specific to the compiler I work on right now. It's not a general problem.