Will Intel Ship an x86-64bit Chip This Year? 336
Solid Paradox writes "According to The Register, American Technology Research predicts an x86-64-bit processor will 'soon' arrive from Intel and in another story, they also predict that Sun and IBM will be the major players in the future 64-bit boom. Meanwhile the Inquirer has a somewhat related article entitled Senior Intel PR man talks 64-bit extension talk, which follows their Pentium V will launch with 64-bit Windows Elements article that says that the chip is to be sampled internally this month."
Stack size (Score:1, Insightful)
I guess recursive algorithms are about the become a memory hog.
Windows XP 64-bit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dumb question (Score:1, Insightful)
it's an evolutionary step.
5 years from now, when you are completely used to 64bit, taking you back to 32bit will definitely be noticeable.
just like if we forced you to use a 16bit processor and operating system today, you'd notice, wouldn't you?
just what we need (Score:4, Insightful)
Did I Miss Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't IBM already a major player [apple.com]?
Re:Dumb question (Score:5, Insightful)
Not actually true. The larger the word size, the more bits you have to move on every operation. Going to a larger word size is normally driven by application requirements: if an application doesn't need a larger address space or a wider ALU a larger word can actualy make it slower.
What can you do with a 64-bit processor?
Well, one thing you can do is directly address every byte on the largest disk drives we can get today. With an operating system that was designed for direct access, like Multics, you would never have to "read" any files: when you opened one, it would look just as if it had already been read in... all your physical memory would effectively be a big disk cache.
For another, you can give each computer on the network part of the address space, so the same thing would be true for any file on your local LAN. Or any program on your LAN... no more messing around with protocols and remote file servers and databases... if you had the access rights, it would be as if they were local files.
You could do the same thing for each instance of a program, so you wouldn't need complex mapping code when passing messages from one program to another... in fact you could just pass the address of a message and let the memory management system move it over when you actually need it. That would get rid of a LOT of redundant copying, since you probably don't need all parts of every message.
The problem is, you'd need a whole new OS (or a whole old one... Multics is older than UNIX) to really take advantage of this kind of thing.
Re:Pentium V (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:x86-64??? (Score:3, Insightful)
What?
Leadership is determined by who's got more out there, not by who's following whose standard. By your definition, AMD could never ever achieve leadership position because it's usinng Intel's instructions.
AMD may be a threat, but it has not ousted Intel, not by a long shot.
Re:Very Likely (Score:5, Insightful)
However, your other comments about AMD and the Opteron are spot on, IMO - the enterprise world is NOT going to buy a competing, slightly incompatible 64bit platform when it has already invested in another 64bit platform that is ALREADY AVAILABLE and is KNOWN to be just as fast/faster than a 32bit commodity platform or an older 64bit platform like a PPC box from IBM. It's hard enough these days for IT departments to support the current heterogenous mix of 32bit commodity desktops and servers and the old/new 64bit platforms from AMD and IBM. Throwing in a third which could cost even more and add more headaches would be pretty hard to sell, IMHO.
You were also right about marketing; AMD abolsutely MUST find a way to conclusively show that GHz != Speed. They need a new aggressive marketing campaign ASAP - unless the rumours about Prescott being a bit of a dud are true.....
Either way, AMD knows that they're sitting on a goldmine; they just need to exploit it as much as they can.
Re:x86-64??? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the term "leadership" by itself is commonly understood to refer to "technical leadership", i.e., who sets the standard, not who moves more product. If there is any ambiguity, just be clear about it. In this case, from context, it should be clear that the term was used to talk about technical leadership.
By your definition, AMD could never ever achieve leadership position because it's usinng Intel's instructions.
The instructions Intel defined ten years ago don't help us determine who leads the industry now technically. What matters is recent changes, who made them, and who copied them.
AMD may be a threat, but it has not ousted Intel, not by a long shot.
And AMD may never "oust" Intel. But they can still be in a technical leadership position.
Re:Dumb question (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think anyone needs more speed than the best 32 bit CPUs provide today. The bigger problem today is bugs. Memory leaks, security flaws, memory protection errors, you name them. If I understand him correctly, Linus Torvals has weighed in to say that 64 bit architecture will allow a new way of addressing devices: 1:1 mapping. This will eliminate a huge amount of paging and cacheing code in OSs. If I read Linus correctly, he is saying that 64 bits is enough to map any entire hard drive space directly into memory. This brings me to the comments of another luminary: Donald Knuth. Knuth has written and demonstrated ways of writing very low bug count software, and created a seminal work, the practical, non-trivial application LaTeX, which I use daily. Knuth has proved that a large complex application with strong change management can achieve a very low bug count and still have enough features to have no real competition in its field.
So what I am getting to is another question: is 64 bits enough, now and forever? I mean will we ever need more address space for anything? So can we write or change our OS so direct mapping of everything is the norm, and thus eliminate half the cleverness and most of the bugs in the OS? And expect that this will be "the last re-write". That all that will be needed in the future is new device drivers and re-compiles for new CPUs?
Re:But... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to nitpick, Linux has supported other 64-bit architectures (at least Alpha) from its early years, so it definitely has the 64-bitness sorted out already. X86-64 is a relatively new thing, but not quite the first one with 64 bits.
Re:But... (Score:2, Insightful)
a) With the exception of the black magicians of the embedded systems, people people do not, in general, have to write bit-banging assembler code. Who cares if x86 is shite - and no-one's disputing that here - if the compiler/interpreter hides them nassty, nassty bitses.
b) It is imperative that the legacy code runs fast or that it can be easily recompiled. You mentioned that you've run Alphas. I too had an Alpha 164LX in 1990s and ran Linux on it. It was fine and dandy, but after a while I got tired fixing those stupid-programmer-cast-a-pointer-to-int bugs in order to compile free software. I expect tons and tons of similar problems on Opteron platforms, but on IA64 the problems would probably become ever worse.
Re:Why would you buy an AMD64? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets.
Many dual-cpu boards tie all the memory to one cpu, slowing down the other one.
There are a few boards like that, but certainly not a majority. The difference is very small however, considering that there is just one extra hop across a HT link to the processor with memory. (The memory controllers are directly connected to HT links which minimises latency)
Various versions of the AMD64 architecture are unreasonably expensive.
True, some versions are expensive, but your talking about a technology that's been released for approximately 3 months now. Give it time and prices on the high end stuff will go down. That said, you can get a single proc A64 system for fairly cheap.
I've heard rumors of Linux incompatibility with various boards and bioses.
Rumors...you're giving people advice on whether or not people should purchase a particular architechture on rumors? What's the severity of the problems?
AMD is also in the act of outsourcing it's IT staff to India. While Intel undoubtedly does the same, AMD's action is more recent and this sort of thing shouldn't be rewarded.
I agree
AMD's planning with Microsoft Win64 release was also obviously lackluster if Intel was able to delay it.
That's a whole ton of speculation. There's any number of reasons that release was delayed. MS could be having trouble porting the legacy code over, Intel could have negociated(sp?) hard(keep in mind who has the much larger market share), MS could have wanted to wait for marketing reasons...who knows? It's silly to blame AMD for it though.
My 2 cents.