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Hardware

AMD focuses efforts on Palomino core 97

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-that-giga-hurts dept.
eviljolly writes: "ZDnet's Gamespot reports about the new AMD Palomino core which will be released at 1.5ghz. They also mention something about AMD's first 64bit processor called the ClawHammer which will come out in early 2002 at 2ghz"
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AMD focuses efforts on Palomino core More

AMD focuses efforts on Palomino core

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  • Re:this is stupid (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't get why people continually buy into MS's claim that the reason that Win/Nt/x86's bombs is their need to maintain backwards compatibility. At both the hardware and software level, good design can isolate those issuses to specific modes that could be chosen or not chosen by users. Sloppy design is what's involved in these claims. And the religiosity just wipes me!
  • Note that execution speed on an IA64 is extremely dependent on the compiler. To get acceptable, let alone good, performance, you need to recompile for each implementation of the architecture, since different implementation could have different instruction issue capabilities. (I think this is true, but I haven't checked recently. It might be the case that the IA64 arch specifies enough about the issue capabilities to make all implementations be the same. If so, that would be a severe limit for future implementations. Either way, compiling for IA64 is not something that you do just once.

    This is more serious than running i486 optimized code on a PIII or Athlon, since those CPUs do dynamic out-of-order execution to get good performance when running pretty much any code. (You can get better performance by optimizing specifically for the target CPU, of course). You still get decent performance running i586 programs on an i686, for example. This probably won't be the case with IA64 (and I'm not talking about their hardware IA32 mode, I'm talking about their EPIC design which exposes so much CPU detail that recompiles will become almost necessary between major CPU upgrades. Fortunately with a CPU this fast under the hood, I wouldn't building all the Debian packages I want from source, as long as it was automated :)

    The point of this post is that migrating users over to IA64 won't really work, except for people with enough sense to use software they can compile themselves. Unless I'm missing something about IA64 that would allow future IA64 CPUs to get good performance on old IA64 code, commercial software vendors would have to have a plethera of different versions of their software. I guess they could put all the binaries on the same CD, and select which to install at install time, or even use shared libraries so the choice happens at run time.
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • The slashdot blurb says "early 2001" for release date, but early 2001 has already come and mostly gone. The article itself says 2002. Seems like slashdot could use some editors.

  • I'll need a new motherboard for this, won't I? :(

    I swear, "upgradability" is a myth. Anytime a processor worthy of upgrading to comes out, it either has a different interface or voltage, requiring new motherboards for all. I've never been able to put two consecutive chips in the same board.

    sigh....
  • It's hard to say exactly, since different chips tend to do better at different things. However, if you mean raw math, a prof in my LUG (who happens to be a beowulf big shot) did some benchmarks that more or less show that for large vector math athlon 750s are more or less equivalent to a PIII 933. Obviously, this has little direct bearing on you if you aren't doing particle physics but it would tend to suggest that (at worst) you can assume that Athlons and PIIIs at the same clock speed perform the same. Unfortunately, most of the performance data he put on the web is not up right now because of some legal hassles with AMD but the data is quite interesting. If he is able to repost it (he should be able to soon) I'll try to find an excuse to post it in another thread, or you can email me for some more details.
  • I'm a cross compiler. At weekends I dress up as Pascal...

    Yeah, but do you ever dress up as Ada? :-) (And no, I'm not interested in seeing...)

    --Joe
    --

  • Palomino (Score:3)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Sunday March 25, 2001 @09:54AM (#341175) Homepage Journal
    You mean there's a PONY in there? Cool!

  • Re:startrekmail?? (Score:3)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Sunday March 25, 2001 @04:27PM (#341176) Homepage Journal
    It forwards to my real e-mail address for free. I only use startrekmail.com on the internet. Sort of the same thing as using the name "King Africa" even though you're a 9 year old girl.

  • Take a look at itanium. Sure, it'll run slowly with 32-bit code, but not businesses simply can't recompile everything for the new processor. In many cases, they probably don't even have the source code to do so (e.g. if they use 3rd party libraries from a party that ended a long time ago). If you are suggesting that companies can do this port, it's non-trivial. If you have ever gotten sloppy in C and casted a pointer as an integer, then your code will eventually bomb on IA64, because ints are still 32-bit, but pointers are 64-bit (at least on Win64). That's just one of many gotchyas. Ouch.
  • Naah... personal computing took off on the Apple II and IBM PC. The IBM became the standard business machine, everyone adopted it and adopted MS DOS at the same time. Companies standardized on software that ran only under MS DOS. Each step forward in intel processors was a baby step, keeping complete compatibiltiy with the previous generation. As was each version of DOS, and then Windows after it. Very little has to do with marketing once you actually own the standard. For years Intel and Microsoft have steamrolled superior, but incompatible competitors. The only marketing line they need to use is "it already works with what you have".
  • A few days after the fact...

    I said, that it was backwards compatibility through software that got PowerPC where it is. If apple had intro'd powermacs that couldn't run 68k software, the powerpc series would have been an even bigger flop than MS Bob...

    Next time, please read and quote the entire thought rather than just the 12 words that suit your argument the best.
  • I think it's morally wrong to advocate a solution that leaves users in a position of losing their data, and running inferior programs to boot. StarOffice is no substitute for MS office, except to the most diehard individual, for instance. Yes it has the same checklist of features, but it runs slow as molasses and crashes CONSTANTLY (under both Windows and Linux... i uninstalled it from Windows and kept it under linux to use in a pinch, until finally settling on VMWare.

    Until free software can do everything commercial software can, including reading all of the file formats flawlessly, no amount of "freedom" can substitute for the loss of one's investments in time creating their documents and money spent on programs that won't work upon such a switch.

  • Re:this is stupid (Score:3)

    by um... Lucas ( 13147 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @10:49AM (#341181) Journal
    Backwards compatibility is why x86 is the leading architecture. Backwards compatibility is why DOS & Windows are still the leading platforms for developers. Backwards compatibiltiy is how the PowerPC got it's foothold into the market, and is what Transmeta's trying to do to get their processors accepted by the market place (though in both cases, backwards compatibitliy was achieved through the use of software rather than actual silicon).

    Who wants to "upgrade" their system only to find their applications and more importantly, their documents inaccessible? Yes, you could use linux and open source products so that you wouldn't have any disruption, but 95% of the world (at least) don't have that luxury.
  • If I was smoking crack I would've thought it was funny. Sober, I would've picked informative or interesting.
  • Then why did his quote of the article say '2002?'
  • tyan makes one, but it is muy expensive
  • I was shopping for a new computer and wanted to get an AMD chip because of the lower cost. I couldn't tell what the relative power of the AMD and Intel chips are, however.

    The MHz is only a useful comparison between two of the same processor model (e.g. PIII 500Mhz vs PIII 800MHz). A fast PIII outperforms a slow P4-- and I have no idea where AMD fits in at all.

    Does anyone know what the relative ranking of chips is?

    -m

  • Re:this is stupid (Score:3)

    by WNight ( 23683 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @12:25PM (#341186) Homepage
    The problem with that is that Microsoft and other closed-source companies will just tack on a new file format, make it the default in the next gen, and then people will claim the open-source product is crap because it can't read the new format.

    What is really needed is proper Word97 support, or some other older but still usable format. The new formats don't support anything that 99.8% of people will ever use, they're just there to keep other applications from being compatible.

    And this isn't a open-source whine. The closed-source companies are trying to proprietize to stop any competitors. WordPerfect support MS formats, so MS invents new ones. WordPerfect developers (back before it was owner by Corel) admitted to such, and they said they knew that Microsoft was doing the same for the same reason. In fact, things like the Halloween document prove it.
  • There's just no market for a very expensive, very slow, incompatible CPU.

    Hmm. Wonder why?
  • The PIII and Athlon are roughly MHz comparable when running with SDRAM, except of course that the PIII tops out at 1GHz while the fastest Athlon is currently 1.33GHz.

    If you're using DDR RAM, then Athlon beats PIII at any given MHz rating because it's FSB is twice as fast as that of the PIII and DDR takes advantage of that.

    Things get more difficult with the Athlon vs P4 comparison, but the benchmarks out so far seem to show that the 1.5 GHz P4 is about as fast as a 1-1.2GHz Athlon. When both are configured for max. speed with PC800 RDRAM for the P4 and PC2100 DDR RAM for the Athlon, then a 1.33GHz Athlon blows the 1.5GHz P4 away.

    In theory the P4 with PC800 has far higher memory bandwidth than Athlon even with PC2100 DRR, and this should give it an edge in some benchmarks, but in reality it only shows in synthetic memory benchmarks and Athlon's more balanced architecture proves unbeatable. P4 *without* PC800 RDRAM is severly crippled, and not worth considering.
  • gee, i sure love trolling. don't you?

    jackass.

    and for the record, i get linux running fine. i just use a real os for my server needs, thanks.
    Nice troll! Putting a troll in a post denying that you are a troll is an inspired bit of trolling. Score: +5.
    --
    You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
  • How else would you add more horespower to your computer? [ducks flying fruit]
    --
  • My paladin uses a ClawHammer in Diablo II.

  • Perhaps you should as well :)
  • If the world wanted a new ISA then the x86 would be dead. Someone would have killed it, be it the Sparc, PPC, MIPS, PARISC, alpha, arm, i960, etc. As it is, Intel momentarily forgot that the reason the x86 sells so well is the cost of creating a new ISA to gain 5% is minuscule compared to cost to port the existing software base. As long as x86 is 98% of the general purpose computer market and stays the price performance leader its pretty much hopeless for another processor except in the rare cases where someone needs the absolute fastest thing available. Motorola nuts have been saying since the 8086 the x86 had an old an outdated arch. So what! Where is the 680x0 today? Dead for high performance use. Where will the PPC be in 10 years? Probably the same place, relegated to the CPU people use in cell phones. IBM is its only real hope. They like the POWER cpu. Apple as a company is a flake. They would switch processors in a heart beat. They have done it twice already. Its probably time for another change. At least Apple understood with the last switch that software compatibility and UI is more important than hardware compatibility.
    AMD recognizes a significant weakness in the arch, same as Intel did when it was the 286. So they are going to capitalize on it. The CPU world is a funny place. AMD's x86-64 extensions may not take off but they sure will encourage Intel to make x86-64v2 just like 3Dnow did for SSE. Either that or Intel will be forced to include an extension invented by a clone company. Its like IBM and the PC all over again. Then again the whole thing depends on whether AMD can stay competitive with the P4 too.
  • Since when did any new x86 revision have OS support when it shipped? The 286 protected mode? Nope took a couple years for OS support. The 386 paging and 32 bit extensions? Well that took almost 10 years. MMX, 3Dnow, and SSE those took a few months get app support. Its all about getting the product to market. The people who need the support will write hacks and applications to use it while the general public will have it in their machines for a couple years until the market penetration makes it ok for a big vender to ship default support in the OS.
  • ... a waste of our time, and another banner view for the site. This has no new information, and it certainly doesn't tell us anything new about the new core.

    We still don't know when the 760mp chipset is coming out, we still don't know when Palomino is coming out, we still don't know whether the P4 will catch on, or if AMD's x86-64 sets will dominate.

    Wake me when we can get a definite answer for these questions.

    Another larger question, however is whether or not AMD can overcome the tremendous marketing shadow Intel has cast on them. Most consumers are stuck in the dark ages of misinformation while they laud the great Information Superhighway. They think that AMD solutions will be more error prone, somehow slower, or cause all their incompatibility problems.

    What I'd like to see is very simple benchmarks, convincing to the average consumer, and displayed at the beginning of the computer ad section in Best Buy and CompUSA. Introduce it with the new core, preferably. If buyers even THINK that AMD is faster, they're alot more likely to forget their reservations and follow their wallet, which is where AMD shines. AMD's complete absence from the TV ad arena, while a prudent choice, is confirming the public's suspicions that AMD has something to hide or be ashamed of.

    Without more strength in the consumer confidence department, it'll will be substantially harder to transition to ANY new platform, including DDR.
  • > The fast clock is the real selling feature of this
    > chip.

    Read my post again, from the top. That's pretty much my point.

    Note, BTW, that people have spotted Hammer #defines in Microsoft header files. Microsoft are obviously considering support for the chip. They certainly need to have that option, because they don't want a wave of people turning to Linux/*BSD to run cheap 64-bit servers on AMD's hardware.

  • Re:this is stupid (Score:4)

    by roca ( 43122 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @08:18PM (#341197) Homepage
    You are correct.

    The number one goal is to run 32-bit x86 applications fast. On top of that AMD adds a 64-bit mode that cleans up the instruction set somewhat, adds another 8 general purpose registers and of course 64-bit instructions and addressing, all designed to be fairly easy to target since it's just a variant of the x86 instruction set. The 64-bit mode is there for high-end servers or any OS that wants to use it --- the extra registers and IP-relative addressing should make it faster than regular x86 mode if you can recompile your code. But since the 64-bit and 32-bit code runs on the same core, it doesn't matter too much if people don't use the 64-bit stuff initially.

    If AMD ships the Hammer processors according to schedule then Intel is going to be in a very bad position. IA64 performance simply *sucks* and it always will; static scheduling just does not work, and the smartest compilers in the world can't get around that. Intel gambled and lost on that one. Consequently IA64 will keep slipping and probably never ship in volume. There's just no market for a very expensive, very slow, incompatible CPU.

    However, because of the investement and credibility, Intel can't just abandon the IA64. It'll be dragging them down for years. Meanwhile the best they can do is to keep revving the P4, which is already slower than the Athlon, and marketing it as hard as they can. That'll keep them going for a while but customers who want actual performance or a 64-bit architecture, not to mention value for money, will increasingly go to AMD.

    The only bright spot for Intel is the rumoured SMT capabilities of the future P4 rev, Foster. That could give them a boost; we'll have to wait and see.
  • Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No. Incorrect. Sun was running on Moto 68K at the time. The i386 series was very clearly an attempt to catch up to Motorola.

    Curiously enough, the Sun386i was Sun's first non-Motorola platform. Yep, it ran SunOS 4.0 more usably than the Motorola boxes. Of course Sun killed that product line since it competed too effectively with SPARC boxes like the Sun4/110 ... and they had just decided to get into the CPU business. Know anyone who managed to get a pre-release Sun486i? Collector's item. Even though it was Intel CPUs that got Sun into some of its current major (non-Scientific) markets ... customers bought the Intel name more than the Sun name at that time.

  • I doubt this. Intel is not aiming for Sun's market. Anybody who buys Sun hardware does so becuase it's insanely reliable, very scalable, and usually better suited to specific tasks (serving, crunching, etc). x86 simply does not match the benefits of using Sun hardware. Moving the PC space into a 64-bit architecture is the next fundamental step forward in faster home/business computing. Support? Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No. The market wanted faster computers that could handle more memory as demand from applications increased. We're simply doing this again.

    This market is exactly what the Itanium is aimed at. If it wasn't do you really think that HP would be working with the Itanium rather than the PA/RISC? HP's PA/RISC stuff is in exactly the same market as Sun's SPARC offerings.

  • I am interested in reading about the technolgies AMD is using to reduce the thermal output of these chips. I have heard that a special (more pure, or possibly a different isotope) form of silicon is used. The core will also run at a much lower voltage.

    Over on Aces' Hardware [aceshardware.com] there's a story [aceshardware.com] that passive cooling may be all that is needed for Palomino chips running at 1.5 GHz. Is it hype, is it truth? It would certainly be nice to be able to upgrade from my 1.0 GHz space heater to a 1.5 GHz cup warmer. :)

    From what I have seen on the various tech sites it looks like Palomino will put AMD on near parity with Intel in regards to raw MHz. As the current Athlon core demonstrates clockspeed is less relevent than efficiency, but for sheer bragging rights on the desktop clock for clock even the current Athlon core *greatly* exceeds the performance of any similarly clocked Intel chip used for comparison. If Palomino has enhanced cache performance or better branch prediction it will humble Intel's best even further.

    I will be interested in seeing what kind of speeds Palomino can reach on laptops.

    I do not look for the P-4 to be competitive with the Athlon until it undergoes a die shrink to .13 micron to make room for more cache, and gains another FPU (as was originally planned.) I think Intel can look forward to a summer of humiliation until they get the die shrunk P-4 out to their OEMs.

    And then six months later according to all indicators Sledgehammer/Clawhammer will jump up and down on P-4 and smash it into tiny little twitching bits right before it sinks its teeth into Itanium. There's no rest for the wicked. :)

  • Caveat emptor, any or all of this could be hype. :)

    I think I currently trust AMD's word more than I trust Intel's. The ones I tend to trust most are Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com], Anandtech [anandtech.com], and Aces' Hardware.

    I see ZD-Net, C|Net, and and their ilk as being informative as long as you take their endorsement of any platform with a skeptical grain of salt. When you surf these sites you have to keep in mind that each has its own interests tied closely to various hardware manufacturers.

    At least Tom's, Anand's, and Aces' have no overt interest in the succes of one of the big tech companies over another. That's a positive mark for them in my book.

  • Actually the 1.2 GHz 133 MHz FSB Thunderbird more than suffices in comparison to the 1.5 GHz P-4. Apologies for being unclear.

  • As I recall Tom's went into an "agreement" with C|Net, but that's a good point. I do not believe it has ever really been clarified on their site, but I have noticed for the most part he tends to bite all hands equally. :)

    Ace's and Anand are still completely independent.

    Basically trust no one except yourself, and only trust yourself after you have gathered enough information to make an informed decision. How's that? :)

  • For price/performance right now I feel Thunderbird leads. If you want bleeding edge performance *I* would recommend a 1.33 GHz T-bird system, 256 MB of PC-2100 DDR SDRAM, and a GeForce 2 video card.

    The P-4 1.5 GHz may come *close* to the performance of the 1.33 GHz Thunderbird in a few areas, and may exceed its performance in Quake 3, but for those dubious "achievments" you'll pay an extra $500 or more, money that you could use to upgrade your Thunderbird system to a nice 21" monitor, or a flat panel display.

    If you are using real world applications, need floating point power for 3-D, and want your machine to be powerful across a wide variety of potential applications then the Thunderbird is the chip for you.

    If you want sheer gigahertz bragging rights, do not use any office applications, don't care that Quake 3 is the only game you can play that you can boast to friends has a fantastic frame rate, don't care that the current motherboard will not support the next generation of Pentium 4's, and use Flask DiVX ;-) to compress your DVDs onto a single CD then by all means go out and grab a P-4. :)

  • The most critical issue for AMD is not CPU speed but power consumption. In addition to the increased speed, that is the real promise of the Palamino core.

    The newly released Thunderbird chips at 1.3 GHz are great chips but I wonder if AMD can really increase their portion of the server market if they don't introduce cooler chips that work well in slim rack mounted configurations. Until then I will continue to use my Athlon 500 that is running at 700 but sounds like a jet engine with all the cooling ;-)
  • Perhaps you should as well :)

    It's not his fault.... /. did another (extremely rude) update without marking the article "UPDATED".

    -rt-
  • good question! but there were a couple of other posts that raised the same question. My guess: he saw the error on the front page, hit "read more", and copied from the recently updated page without reading. I'm only guessing because there were some other posts with similar comments:

    #1&nbsp [slashdot.org] #8&nbsp [slashdot.org] #9&nbsp [slashdot.org]

    But they obviously updated it pretty quick. Still, it's rude to do it without informing anybody, makes people look dumb. It happened to me once about a year back (and got me modded down).

    -rt-
  • No, x86 is the leading architecture because of marketing. Microsoft's and Intel's marketing, and no other reason.

    -----
    "People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
  • Sounds like some subliminal messaging from AMD as to what to use on your Intel processors.
  • Because AMD is probably going to release it at about 1/3 the price of the Itanic. I suspect Intel is secretly developing a CPU of the same ilk.

    Even though there are CPUs that are a lot better than the x86, x86 won the marketplace.


    blessings,

  • AMD's 64-bit architecture (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @06:09PM (#341211) Homepage
    AMD has disclosed what the program-level architecture looks like. It's an reasonable extension of the x86 architecture to 64 bits. The chips will run in 32-bit mode, and support the ability to run 32-bit programs under a 64-bit OS. Some of the less-used features of the x86 are gone in 64-bit mode; most notably, segmented memory management. There are few surprises in this chip. gcc has been ported; it was an easy job.

    This is the machine Intel probably should have made, rather than the Inanium.

  • Re:AMD's 64-bit architecture (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday March 26, 2001 @08:40AM (#341212) Homepage
    The basic problem with the Inanium is that it requires near-omniscience from the compiler to make VLIW-type explicit parallelism work. Dozens of architectures requiring explicit parallelism in the code have been developed over the years, generally as "supercomputers". None ever got any significant market share.

    It will be amusing if, say, nVidia puts an IA-32 core on their graphics chip and starts taking over the low end with a one-chip computer.

  • SledgeHammer will be the server version of AMD's X86-64 processor.

    ClawHammer will be more marketed towards workstations and desktops.

  • I guess they could put all the binaries on the same CD, and select which to install at install time, or even use shared libraries so the choice happens at run time.

    I thought that a number of companies were already doing that with their x86 code, so extending it to IA64 isn't going to kill them. Certainly I know that various Linux vendors are already shipping multiple different libraries on their CDs so that the one that's optimized for the right x86 version gets installed. RedHat, for instance, includes processor optimized glibc and kernel versions in RH7. I'd assume that this wouldn't be too terribly hard to do for most companies, since the amount of really performance critical code is comparatively small. I've also heard about using userspace code morphing approaches to optimize binaries. IIRC, HP was able to get real world performance enhancements even after the added overhead when code morphing compiled code onto the same processor(!) because they could optimize behavior that couldn't be accounted for until runtime.

  • Re:No, it's VERY necessary. (Score:4)

    by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Sunday March 25, 2001 @12:19PM (#341215) Homepage
    Intel's strategy for their upcoming CPU is to not make it backwards compatable. This is a *serious* flaw in their plans and I don't think we're going to see them succeed with this venture. There won't be apps for it! Users would bitch and complain and only a few vendors will actually properly update their apps.

    Actually, Intel's plan makes perfect sense. They're trying to market their chip first to the kinds of users who are willing to rewrite/recompile their software to take advantage of the new instruction set. Those people are the ones running Open Source code like Linux and Apache or homebuilt applications for special purpose applications. Note, for instance, that RedHat is already working on an Itanium version of their distro. That market will then give vendors like Microsoft a reason to develop versions of their software for the Itanium. You can be that if Linux + Apache + Perl on Itanium turns out to be a successful web serving environment that MS is going to want to produce a Windows + IIS + ASP competitor. Once the hard part of porting Windows is done, MS is going to want to move their other apps to the new architecture, too, and the whole market will move over. Intel is looking at it taking 5 years or so to move completely from x86 to IA64, but they've actually figured out a way of breaking backward compatibility and not dying for it. Of course they're also keeping an alternative around by keeping their x86 development, so if things blow up on them they'll still have chips to sell.

  • Skip the middle man...here's the map (Score:3)

    by AdmiralNanook ( 134034 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @09:52AM (#341216)
    http://www.amd.com/news/virtualpress/roadmap.html
  • You mean, "Intel should have made some half-assed extension to a painfully obsolete ISA rather than have the balls to invent a radically new and innovative ISA that might actually be able to exploit the rediculously large number of transistors that will be on future chips for something other than cache."

    Actually, when I first heard about IA-64 (the new ISA for Itanium) I thought it was about time.

    ...It was probably around four years ago, and Itanium is still not finished...

    Also, nobody has any experience of using VLIW (or EPIC, whatever) style ISA on a general purpose processor before, so that will probably cause problems in the beginning. (Ok, Transmeta CPUs are VLIW, but you won't run them natively, and so far their performance haven't been stellar either.)

    So just fixing up some of the worst problems of IA-32 ISA might actually be a good idea (another way would have been to design another 64bit ISA and just make better work than Intel has been doing). AA-64 ISA gives us twice the number of general purpose registers (which are twice as big as the old ones) and gives us register based FPU insted that horrible stack based monster we have suffered two decades. (Well, it was probably a good idean when FPU was it's own CPU but Intel should have at least given us a register based alternative to access it when it designed Pentium...)

    The bottom line: IA-64 looks good in paper, but after the difficulties in implementation it doesn't look so good anymore. The AA-64 doesn't look that good in paper but doesn't seem to suffer same kinds of problems as IA-64 chips. However, neither is yet officially released (and AA-64 won't for a long time) so it will take some time untill we see which is actually better.

  • Intel's strategy for their upcoming CPU is to not make it backwards compatable. This is a *serious* flaw in their plans and I don't think we're going to see them succeed with this venture.

    If I have to respond to this kind of comment one more time I will SCREAM. Intel is, repeat is, retaining backwards compatibility with IA32 application code on their IA64 processor. Read the literature that is out there right now before you make this completely erroneous assertion.

    I have an IA64 machine in my office running Linux right now. I run Quake 3 Arena on it. I guarantee there is not an IA64 version of Q3A, I'm running IA32 Q3A binaries, I run IA32 StarOffice binaries, I run IA32 Oracle binaries. I don't know of any IA32 Linux application that doesn't run. If fact, if you know of one, please let me know, one of my jobs in life is to make sure that IA32 applications run on IA64 Linux.

    --
    Don Dugger
    VA Linux Systems

  • But your RAM, NIC, video card, SCSI card, sound card, HD, CD-ROM and case all work, correct?

  • Correction (Score:4)

    by jrcamp ( 150032 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @09:46AM (#341220)
    The article states:

    Further down the road for AMD's desktop plans come Thoroughbred and ClawHammer. Both are on the same early 2002 schedule AMD announced last fall.

    CmdrTaco should do a "make sense" check before he posts stories. It's well past early 2001.

  • &gtThey also mention something about AMD's first 64bit processor called the ClawHammer which will come out in early 2001 at 2ghz"

    Gee, I must have missed that one!
  • >the ClawHammer which will come out in early 2001 at 2ghz"

    So it is already out?
  • It makes sense, because the market uses $$$ as the optimal means of conveying the value of performance! that doesn't even BEGIN to be true. the high-clock P4s cost VASTLY more than high-clock tbirds, and lose in both benchmarks and real world applications. the only thing the P4 does better than the athlon is certain multimedia apps that take advantage of the new instruction set, but because of it's "guessing" method of performing normal calculations (which too often fails, causing the cpu to have to redo the same operation) the P4 lags behind in almost every other application and in overall speed. the tbird athlon is a much better chip, even at a lower clock speed, and for an enormously better price. the only reason intel does so well is because everyone has been spoon-fed intel forever and consumers that don't know anything buy what they know. go check out the opinions of real hardware enthusiasts at some place like the [H]ard|OCP forums and you'll find that there is NO SUPPORT WHATSOEVER for the P4. it's shunned like the iMac. everyone has a thunderbird. period.
  • Backwards compatibility is how the PowerPC got it's foothold into the market

     Compatible with what?
    Compatible with the chips that used to ship in older macs, as in Motorola 68000 series processors? Not on your life. The Motorola 68k series architecture is about as old as the x86 architecture. The 68000 series was introduced at about the same time as the 8086, sometime roughly around 1978. The 68000 series is also a decidedly CISC architecture.

    The PowerPC was a ground up rework of what Motorola was doing, based on IBM designs for the most part. THe PPC processors are RISC or post-RISC processors unlike the MC68000 series. The instruction set is designed to be able to make the transition from a 32 bit architecture to a 64 bit architecture.

    The reason that Apple chose to use the PPC series of processors had nothing to do with compatibility with the processors they were using since they are in no way compatible. They wrote an emulator into MacOS to emulate a MC68040 processor for older programs. Some programs were FAT binaries that were forked with a PPC binary portion and a 68k binary portion.

    I have always wondered what would have happened if M$ had actually taken the time to write an emulator for the 23 year old x86 instructions for something like an Alpha and then rework all of their own code to support it natively. I wonder how much faster PCs would be now...

    Anyways OmniWeb rocks, I finally have spell checking while typing comments on Slashdot.
  • I find it funny how chipmakers always change the names of their project, at ramdom. Remember that this CPU was supposed to be SledgeHammer at first. Now it ClawHammer, sound kinda weak to me.

    "That is the stupidest fucking signature I have ever seen"
  • ClawHammer and SledgeHammer are two different chipps, based on the same core but targeted on different markets. The SledgeHammer is going to be introduced a short while after ClawHammer and will feature 4-8 way SMP. The ClawHammer will be avaliable with up to two CPUs in SMP.
  • My point is, everyone SHOULD use linux or other Free Software products, because it's morally wrong to use proprietary software.
    GNU

    Isn't it also "morally wrong" to force your opinions on others? Or does your set of "morals" contain a double-standard that allows for loopholes when an issue is favorable to you?

    Sorry, but the wet dream of a world where everyone types away on Star Office and browses the web with Lynx will _never_ be realized. Commercial software will never go away.
    --

  • Re:No, it's VERY necessary. (Score:3)

    by MrBogus ( 173033 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @11:29AM (#341228)
    The guy is snotty, but he has a proper point in his reply. AMD releasing an 64-bit CPU with NO commercial operating system compatibility it totally fucking braindead. And as for Open Source OSes, if that's all you got, wtf hang onto the i386 ISA?

    The best AMD can hope with their 64-bit consumer CPU is some optimized Windows video drivers to improve people's Quake scores. Not quite the same market as Sparc or Itaninum, so it's pointless to compare AMD-64 to any real server/workstation chip.

    Just like how the i386 brought 10 years of "extenders" instead of real 32-bit OSes, I bet a good number of these 64-bit chips WILL be nicely chunking 80-fucking-86 real mode code in some consumer's Windows ME machine. Yes - this sort of backward compatibility rules, if you like the idea that 20 year old asm code is necessary to run your computer. All Fanboys rally around in support!

    Not to mention that your post is incorrect at many points: IA64 does have (slow) IA32 compatibility, and besides it's primarily aimed for a market which is currently buying Sun Sparcs and the like and doesn't give a shit about IA32 compatibility. Furthermore, there's nothing about NT's DOS emulation which makes the OS unstable or slow - it's all in userspace.

  • Re:Disagreements with your last paragraph. (Score:3)

    by MrBogus ( 173033 ) on Sunday March 25, 2001 @12:07PM (#341229)
    To the end user in the market, this is the same as not working

    The "end user" is some spare tire-wearing system administrator. The only IA64 applicaiton Microsoft plans to ship on launch is SQL Server. Somehow I think that some 150K DBA can figure out that the IA32 compatibility is for legacy object code, or maybe some little utilities (like WinZip, etc).

    I doubt this. Intel is not aiming for Sun's market.

    This incorrect statement just shows that you haven't been paying any attention to Intel's IA64 marketing.

    x86 simply does not match the benefits of using Sun hardware.

    And that's why IA64 is not based on x86, DUH.

    Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No.

    Incorrect. Sun was running on Moto 68K at the time. The i386 series was very clearly an attempt to catch up to Motorola. Unfortunatly for Intel, IBM and Microsoft fucked up the OS support.

    NT's old compatibility code is a serious cause of slow-downs an instabilities

    What old compatibility code? Neither WOW or NTVDM even run unless you launch a 16-bit app. Try reading up on NT sometime. My guess is that your super reliable source doesn't even know the difference between Windows NT and Windows 9x/ME, and neither do you.

    BTW, I'm actually hoping that I'm getting trolled here and that you are not as blockhead stupid as you seem to be.
  • Whether or not you think it's morally wrong doesn't matter in the corporate world. You are just one consumer. Now if an enormous percentage of Windows users and programmers were to share your opinion, then it would be a different story.

    A microprocessor manufacturer that shells out billions and billions of dollars in design and production is not going to act on what a few people perceive as moral. They're going to try to produce something that people will buy. People won't buy a system that doesn't run the software they like. And software manufacturers chose to write software for the system that has the largest marketshare because that equates to more potential consumers for them. And programmers will work for software companies that produce profit and can pay them.

    If you want to convince people to support free software products, you need to demonstrate profitability. Morality means squat.
  • why do we still have to wait so long for an x86 64 bit processor?
  • You mean, "Intel should have made some half-assed extension to a painfully obsolete ISA rather than have the balls to invent a radically new and innovative ISA that might actually be able to exploit the rediculously large number of transistors that will be on future chips for something other than cache."
  • Now granted most of the architecture for x86 is old and needs to eventually die off, but AMD's job for making the 64bit processors is *NOT* to try and re-engineer the x86 architecture, otherwise it wouldn't be the first 64bit x86 processor, it would be a new 64bit architecture like Itanium... the whole idea was to extend the capabilities of x86 which honestly is the MOST MARKETABLE processor for home/business use, and somewhat for the server market too! So to be honest, AMD made a brilliant move, that Intel is shying away from, in that they took something old and obselete and they improved it, just like they've done a few other times! Considering this is a free opinion, don't rant and rave about it, you got your money's worth if you don't like it! :)
  • passive cooling may be all that is needed for Palomino chips running at 1.5 GHz.

    I really wish that was true. I might even upgrade my computer just because of that. CPU fans make most of the noise in desktop computers nowadays and I'm really looking forward to getting rid of it.

  • I mean, why the x86 compatability? So it can mimic an x86 processor? So you can continue to run 16 bit software on it?

    Umm... Yes. I believe that IS the point. And, 32-bit software too.

  • A LOT of people still use their 32 bit software. I'd sure hate to get all new games and apps just so I could use my new $2000 computer.
  • I dunno if the other replies are of this vein, but in y experience there's two pretty reliable ways to do this kind of comparison shopping; either getting the fastest MHz at the price you are willing to pay (say $90, you can get a 500MHz Celeron, a 650MHz Duron, or a 550 MHz Athlon, I'd get the Duron), or you can get the fastest processor at the highest price; 1.12GHz Intel, 1.25GHz AMD, I'd get the AMD Athlon...

    It makes sense, because the market uses $$$ as the optimal means of conveying the value of performance!

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • I am so very wrong.

    The Intel P4s are something like $600 to the Athlon's $300. You acknowledge that yourself. But I think you misinterpret my words:
    "get the fastest processor at the highest price"

    I never meant for a buyer to spend the most money possible; that's silly and stupid. Rather take the most the can afford, say $170, and find all the CPUs at that price, and take the highest clocked CPU. This is perfectly valid for x86 CPUs because so much is weighted by clockspeeds, but across the various flavors of AMDs and Intels.

    Using SharkyExtreme, $170 gives us an Athlon 950MHz, An Athlon T-bird 1.1GHz, and a P3 850MHz. Guess what? The T-bird wins.

    I can see why you can interpret my statement to mean "Buy the most expensive CPU on the market", but with that kind of reasoning, one would buy, san, an SGI P3 Xeon or something!

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]

  • EVERYONE should be running Linux, because it is the right thing to do.

    i seem to remember something about selecting tools for jobs, but i can't remember quite how it goes.

    gah. zealotry is sickening, no matter what the cause.

    --saint
    ----

  • You just don't know it because you're too stupid to get it running.

    gee, i sure love trolling. don't you?

    jackass.

    and for the record, i get linux running fine. i just use a real [netbsd.org] os for my server needs, thanks.

    --saint
    ----

  • Nice troll! Putting a troll in a post denying that you are a troll is an inspired bit of trolling. Score: +5.

    ah, it's so nice to be appreciated. :)

    --saint
    ----
  • not only do they have different opcodes, the intel chips are going to use Very Long Word Instruction sets, which are a very big change from what is used currently, in fact, the intel 64 bit chips will not be x86 at all. The amd version is simply extending current registers to 64 bit and adding a few new ones, i believe they are appending either a b or r to the new 64 bit registers, and of course expect to see new 3dNow instructions, but it is an x86 chip, with all of the same instructions. -IAAALP (I Am An Assembly Language Programmer)
  • Why would anyone want to make a 64 bit processor backwards compatible? This (backward compatibility) is why all x86 chips are trash nowadays! Let's see, a 64 bit chip which boots into REAL MODE. Laughable.

  • You have been replied to here [slashdot.org]

  • You have been replied to here [slashdot.org]

  • My point is, everyone SHOULD use linux or other Free Software products, because it's morally wrong to use proprietary software.
    GNU

  • What I'd like to see is very simple benchmarks, convincing to the average consumer, and displayed at the beginning of the computer ad section in Best Buy and CompUSA. Introduce it with the new core, preferably. If buyers even THINK that AMD is faster, they're alot more likely to forget their reservations and follow their wallet, which is where AMD shines. AMD's complete absence from the TV ad arena, while a prudent choice, is confirming the public's suspicions that AMD has something to hide or be ashamed of.

    Why on earth would resellers want to do that? The Athlon systems cost less. If consumers buy more Athlon-based PC's, then the reseller doesn't have such large sales figures. The more expensive a system is, the more profit you can milk from an identical markup percentage. A reseller has no financial incentive to encourage customers to buy Athlons.

    Not the mention the fact that there still aren't a whole lot of consumer-targetted Athlon PC's from the big vendors who sell to Joe Doorknob. If HP has a product line of 6 consumer PC's, only 2 of them (at most) will be non-Intel.
  • Intel will make the first true 64 bit architecture from scratch

    Really? Shit. Somebody better tell Sun, MIPS, DEC/Compaq, Motorola, IBM...
  • Well, if you are doing lots of things at the same time, i.e. compiling something while working in another window, then twin PIII 1Ghz work out very cheap. 500 quid in UK, translate as necessary into the shiny pebbles, beads, trinkets etc. used by other economies.
  • "Yeah, but do you ever dress up as Ada? "

    Sorry, I'm not into the "bondage and discipline" scene...

    Graspee

  • Gad, the 1.5 Palimino was demonstrated already yet. Samples are out. The core is done. The only reason why AMD is not shooting these things out the door already is that the P4 is a total dog. They figure that they really don't have to eat their own children for a little while. Once the 760MP gets them some traction in the server space, it makes more sense to bring out the hammer. I dare say that when they do *ntel may lose a bit more market share than they would care to admit. Folks really are not going to go to the hassle of having several versions of their software on their shelves just so *ntel can sell a few more processors. A 32 bit mode that works will make it a dominant processor in all but the most diehard *ntelicide shops.

  • Faster... smaller... better... must improve...
  • hmm... late already then!

  • There's no way they're going to catch up. I'm not even going to bother with them anymore. When AMD gets their 64-bit chips out I'll upgrade. No sense buying an expensive 32-bit chip now when you can wait on a 2 GHz monster. As long as it has backwards compatability, I'm game.

    Just curious. The new opcodes on these processors, are they going to be even remotely similar to each other. If they aren't I'd hate to see the x86 market split between two incompatable chipsets.

  • IANAALP (I Am Not An Assembly Language Programmer) I have made a few Hello Worlds!, Message Boxes, and some kind of a response from SDL with assembly. Just sort of playing around. Thanks for the info. I'm going AMD all the way. Even if Intel does have backwards support I'm still going with AMD. I've been considering upgrading for a long time. I'm glad I didn't now.

    Windows + Intel = Wintel

    Windows + AMD = Whammed

    Linux + Intel = Lintel (soup?)

    Linux + AMD = Lammed (lambed? lamed?)

  • I am glad to see AMD working on some of this stuff. If they are to survive as a chipmaker, they are going to need to enter the server market, and these chips will be useful for that. Especially the ClawHammer, I'll bet that's going to be a pretty sweet chip. Speaking of server products, does anyone know of a dual-processor socket A board yet, that's been released in the US?
  • I agree with the former two repliers. An athlon at 1.2ghz with ddr ram is about equally fast as an P4 with RDRAM, and an athlon 1.33ghz with ddr ram is faster than a P4 in nearly every comparison (Quake 3 tends to run slightly faster on a P4).

    Basically, a highly clocked athlon outperforms a P4, but is quite cheaper.

    ----
  • Intel will make the first true 64 bit architecture from scratch(their biggest project in 32 yrs. ) AMD just took their 32 bit arc. and converted it to 64.(can you say half ass or 64/2?). Gem: Notice intel's above floydian syncronicity.
  • did you mean early 2002??
  • AMD's strategy makes a lot more sense to me than Intel's. Intel simply delivered the best processors they could under the constraint of backwards compatibility, which turned out to be good enough for the market even though other companies had faster and cheaper processors.

    With 64bit processors, the roles are reversed. Intel's 64bit architecture is a radical break with the past. Code generation for it is completely different from previous Intel processors, and even harder than for other RISC machines. AMD, OTOH, is delivering something backwards compatible with some 64bit instructions.

    If I wanted a nice 64bit processor and didn't care about backwards compatibility, I'd get a Sun Blade or an Alpha today. But I'm using a PC because of the widespread adoption of the processor. 64bit support in a PC to me is a convenient add-on feature, but I don't want to throw out my existing environment over it. Altogether, Intel's 64bit processor doesn't look attractive to me at all.

  • Is this what you take to it when it crashes so much?
  • Dude, if a company releases a processor that cannot run any existing binaries on the market, that processor will flop. Plain and simple. You see, as sad as it is, most of the world does not run an open source OS for which programs can be easily compiled for this new non-backwards compatable 64-bit CPU. Intel's strategy for their upcoming CPU is to not make it backwards compatable. This is a *serious* flaw in their plans and I don't think we're going to see them succeed with this venture. There won't be apps for it! Users would bitch and complain and only a few vendors will actually properly update their apps.

    But on another point of view, x86 architecture is meant for the mainstream. It's not intended for mission critical or super-computationally intensive work. If you want a 100% true-to-life 64-bit platform, shell out the measily 1000$US for a Sun Blade [sun.com] or play with UltraSPARC's/Alphas/etc. As for the PC arena, backwards compatability is essential (why do you think MS still include old DOS compatability in NT, when removing it would make the OS much more stable and faster?). Users want all their stuff to work. Scientists/technologists are more than happy to ditch backwards compatable stuff, but not everyone.

  • Not to mention that your post is incorrect at many points: IA64 does have (slow) IA32 compatibility,

    For all intensive purposes though, can you really call this compatibility? Doesn't compatibility also encompass and denote a certain level of acceptable performance? I've read that 32-bit code running on IA64 is unusably slow. To the end user in the market, this is the same as not working ("something is obviously broken, my apps are slower than they were on my old machine").

    and besides it's primarily aimed for a market which is currently buying Sun Sparcs and the like and doesn't give a shit about IA32 compatibility.

    I doubt this. Intel is not aiming for Sun's market. Anybody who buys Sun hardware does so becuase it's insanely reliable, very scalable, and usually better suited to specific tasks (serving, crunching, etc). x86 simply does not match the benefits of using Sun hardware. Moving the PC space into a 64-bit architecture is the next fundamental step forward in faster home/business computing. Support? Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No. The market wanted faster computers that could handle more memory as demand from applications increased. We're simply doing this again.

    Furthermore, there's nothing about NT's DOS emulation which makes the OS unstable or slow - it's all in userspace.

    I disagree. My old college buddy, who now works for MS, has had a lot of exposure to members of the Windows team. The general consensus is that NT's old compatibility code is a serious cause of slow-downs an instabilities - especially the DOS stuff, which they would LOVE to ditch entirely (because it would make NT more lucrative to those well versed with *nix). I can't really go into detail because OS's in general are not really my forte (but hey, lots of us regurgitate information passed to us by sources we consider to be trustworthy).

  • NetBurst is in retail machines. IA64 has been running linux for over a year. Why such a big deal over AMD's attempts?

    --
  • It's a hammer and claw in one.

    What do you think the proper name of the part that pulls out the nails is?

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