AMD Predicts End of 32-bit Processors 587
DDumitru writes "Infoworld
reports that AMD predicts it will stop producing 32-bit processors by the end
of 2005. By depending on price cuts for Athlon-64 and Opteron, AMD is predicting that
it's sales of 32-bit CPUs will fall off and obsolete 32-bit systems in less
than 3 years. This is either a push forward, or a tactic to try to capture the 64/32 bit
standard leaving Intel in the rear. Or it could just be hype." I'm not in a hurry to ditch any of my 32-bit machines, so long as I get them replaced by 2038.
32-bits is dieing (Score:2, Funny)
You know..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You know..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know..... (Score:2)
Re:You know..... (Score:2)
http://www.computerbrain.com/cbisys/items.asp?mai
Re:You know..... (Score:5, Informative)
Same w. CD-ROMS at $20.00 new, etc.
Re:You know..... (Score:3, Informative)
That's odd. I've sold a lot of those boards using PC2700 RAM without any problems at all. Perhaps kingston is supplying garbage memory. I don't know. I do this without making a single change to the BIOS, except to set the CPU to the pr
Re:You know..... (Score:3, Insightful)
>> poster wrote:
>>
>> I'm sure you're getting a super board for that
>> price too. What's it a 1/2 layer ECS fire-hazard?
>> Perhaps something printed out by someone's inkjet
>> printer?
> After losing a week being screwed over by an MSI
> board w. the nvida2 mb chipset at 4 times the
> price
Well, that's why in the end, I settled for a Tyan board. High price, but at least I can get definitive lists of RAM-chips and CPUs that are supported.
And it works
Re:You know..... (Score:3, Informative)
Then:
On the other end, at $5 or so they become worth producing again (see PICs and such) because, at that point, no packaging or support is expected...
I'm not so sure I agree with this logic. You can buy OEM CPUs today, even for high-end CPUs, with no packaging other than a small grey box (no sink/fan/doc
Re:You know..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You know..... (Score:3, Insightful)
A modern main processor has tremendous need for I/O and
Re:You know..... (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you should try being captian not-so-obvious and look and see how much it costs to leave that dual Athlon MP, which uses about the same amount of power at idle as at full utilization, on all the time. Also, if you don't need the capacity, why did you buy it in the first place?
Re:You know..... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you care, this is because defect densities in the silicon remain relatively constant, and although die sizes may be reduced somewhat with smaller geometries (not as much as you would think, though, due to wiring density not scaling linearly with gate size), the odds of a defect being fatal (i.e., falling into one of the increasingly dense "wrong spots" on the silicon) increase exponentially with gate size decrease.
Re:You know..... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but the greater number of chips/wafer almost always more than compensates. Remember the increase in the chips/wafer is the square of the inverse of the decrease. I.e., if you go from
Re:You know..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yield = (number of working dice) / (total number of dice manufactured)
Making more total dice does not increase your yield. You must improve the ratio of working to failing dice in order to increase yield.
Also important, recipe-style yield (total output) doesn't go up as you suggest either because, as I mentioned before, die size for
bah (Score:5, Funny)
16-bit? 16-bit? (Score:5, Funny)
16-bit? Why don't you just go lay down on a feather bed and let servants peel your grapes for you? Harumph.
Re:16-bit? 16-bit? (Score:5, Funny)
And you tell the kids of the day that, and they don't believe you...
384,000km? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:16-bit? 16-bit? (Score:3, Insightful)
There might have been some odd 8-bit machine that I don't know about that was used in NASA, but I would expect the bulk of the computing work for the Apollo program was done by Minic
Re:16-bit? 16-bit? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember reading elsewhere that the 36 Kwords of ROM were hard coded by hand threading the bit patterns with tiny wires and magnetic cores, and then they were sealed in a block of epoxy. Turnaround time to fix bugs took weeks.
Ah, teenagers. always wanting the trendy machine (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Ah, teenagers. always wanting the trendy machin (Score:3, Interesting)
I have Visicalc for my spreadsheet needs and the CPM card allows me to use the wonderful WordStar, the king of the word processors.
What is sad is that I'm only 30 and I can tell you that Ctrl-B reformated a paragraph in WordStar. I usually used wsn, however, to edit my C programs, which I then compiled with my lattice C compiler. Those were the days when men were real men and clocks ran at 4.7MHz.
WordStar? (Score:2)
Punk.
Oh yeah, get rid of all that extra RAM - you don't need anything more than 48K!
Re:WordStar? (Score:3, Funny)
And what's an 80 col card?
Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Good news/bad news for AMD (Score:4, Funny)
Bad news: I'm getting a dual 1.8Ghz PowerMac G5, baby! Yeah!
I have to go lay down now.
Massive gains in cooling tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they meant to include that they won't go into these markets which limits their desire to produce low footprint, low heat chips.
Re:Massive gains in cooling tech? (Score:2, Insightful)
AMD has already low-power chip for PDAs and it won't be 64bit anytime soon.
Re:Massive gains in cooling tech? (Score:2)
Re:Massive gains in cooling tech? (Score:2)
Re:Massive gains in cooling tech? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Massive gains in cooling tech? (Score:3, Interesting)
The low-power CPUs are usually low-power in both senses of the word; they may use less power, but they also do less per clock cycle. Your non-low-power CPUs like the Athlon XP or P4 simply do more per clock cycle than, say, VIA EPIA, which isn't even superscalar.
The Athlon XP does more per cycle than the P4; the P4 does more per cycle than the C3. Think of the C3 as a 1.5 liter toyota motor, the Athlon XP as a V8, and the P4 as a turbo straight six, if you must apply automotive metaphors. The C3 is smal
Limits of Underclocking (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Massive gains in cooling tech? (Score:2)
adaptability (Score:5, Insightful)
As a user of open source, I think this shouldn't really be a problem at all, should it? I mean, once gcc can compile 64-bit code, than we should simply be able to recompile all of our current apps for these new processors, shouldn't we? I'd be happy if someone out there could point me out as not being in the know...
Re:adaptability (Score:5, Informative)
The Linux-on-Alpha project already did all the heavy lifting needed to run 64 bit almost ten years ago. Linux and *BSD is already running 64 bit on PowerPC. Virtually any package you can download that has an active support community is already 64 bit ready.
Re:adaptability (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest problem I'm having building a custom install for my AMD64 machines is the fact they have 32-bit compatiblity. On the Alpha is was easy, the lib directories contained 64-bit libaries, because the machines were 64-bit, period. But with the AMD64 the lib dirs are still supposed to contain the 32-bit libs, with the 64-bit versions installed in a lib64 variant. This causes problems because almost no libary packages are setup to compile twice once in 32-bit and then over again in 64-bit mode with a simple
Re:adaptability (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Gcc 3.3 actually compiles to AMD64 (i.e. Athlon 64 and Opteron)
2) Gcc 3.3 generates pretty fast code too, as you can see on spec.org where IBM submitted results obtained with an Opteron, Suse Linux and GCC 3.3 : the baseline is above 1100 whereas Apple said that a Pentium 4 at 3.06GHz only achieves 880 with GCC 3.3. So it seems that the Opteron is a better processor for people who use GCC.
3) I write this text on my Athlon 64 running Mandrake 9.2 RC1 for AMD64. I can tell you that there is litlle left to adapt because it works pretty well. In fact you could hardly tell the system is the AMD64 version...
4) running 32 bit programs works fine : I have to use Java 1.4.2 for Linux x86 since the AMD64 version is not available. To do that, you just run the 32bit Linux program and it works at native speed.
As a conclusion, the Athlon 64 is good but it is still expensive (I paid 450 euros for my processor).
I hope the editors realize... (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope the editors realize that 32bit processors CAN process 64 bit numbers. In Java, for example, the date is handled by a 64bit number that tells the number of milliseconds since Jan 1, 1970. Amazingly enough, that clock won't run out for another few billion years.
Oh, and most Unixes have fixed the time problem. The real issue is getting the programs to switch over to the new APIs.
Re:I hope the editors realize... (Score:4, Informative)
The thing is, in the desktop it will take longer for machines to require more than 4/8 GB of memory.
Re:I hope the editors realize... (Score:2)
Re:I hope the editors realize... (Score:2)
Re:I hope the editors realize... (Score:2)
Re:I hope the editors realize... (Score:3, Informative)
Every intel chip since the PPRO can handle [x86.org] 64gb of ram
*cough* paged *cough* (Score:4, Informative)
John Titor? (Score:3, Funny)
Whew!
Re:I hope the editors realize... (Score:3, Interesting)
but at it's heart, it's doing 32 bit stuff.
Not true. Most modern processors have silicon dedicated to processing 64 bit numbers. In fact, most processors can do 128 bit numbers thanks to SMID instructions (e.g. SSE, 3DNow, Altivec, etc.)
The current definition of a 64 bit processor is one that can use 64 bit memory addre
Why buy 32 now, though (Score:2)
I'm not in a hurry to ditch any of my 32-bit machines, so long as I get them replaced by 2038
True, but it is not reasonable to think that two years from now someone would choose to buy a new desktop machine that is reasonably powerful without it being 64 bit. By that time the price points for 64 bit will be down substantially.
I do believe that 32bit will have a somewhat longer life in the laptop market, as well as the low power/small footprint niche of the Mini-ITX form factor.
Obligatory Bill Gates quote... (Score:2)
a word from the Processor Growers Association (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I have my eye on a new dual G5, so I guess I've bought into the hype that size (word size) matters.
Re:a word from the Processor Growers Association (Score:4, Insightful)
Given this situation, Microsoft is bound to polish and market 64 bit Windows Server (which will soon be available for x86-64) because they know that 64 bit Linux distros are out or will soon be out. MS's place in the server world is far from secure, so it's in their interest to be as competitive as possible in this regard.
So, with servers (and high-end workstations) moving to 64 bit really soon, and the fact that one of x86's strengths is in volume manufacturing, the natural step (especially for AMD) is to move all chips to 64 bit in a fairly short time frame. Besides, the incremental cost per CPU is minimal, AMD claims somewhere around 10% die space. And, it takes more money to design and manufacture separate 32bit and 64bit chips than it does to sell a single product line.
I guess I don't think that any "killer app" is really required above and beyond what is out there already. Big fat database, email, and application servers that could use more than 4 GB of memory NOW.
hrmmmm I don't have to worry about bits. (Score:5, Funny)
maybe.... (Score:2, Interesting)
How Long Until 128-bits? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How Long Until 128-bits? (Score:2, Interesting)
128-bit ALU's won't be useful at all, ever. Aside for things like bignum math co-processors you don't need it. Heck for the most part 32-bit ALU's are over kill. For example, when I hit submit on this form it will prolly strlen() the buffer. Chances are I won'
Re:x86 bashing (Score:3, Insightful)
So why do Alpha, PPC, etc. have those things, when both have 31/32 registers?
The proper answer is, "ARM doesn't need them because it is targeted at low power applications, not high performance."
32 bits alive and well. (Score:2)
most industrial PC104 form factor PC's are running 386 processors. many embedded systems, the stuff that does real work and critical applications are 16 bit or lower processors.
Maybe AMD is dropping the lower bit processors, but Intel sure won't as long as there is a demand for them.
Re:32 bits alive and well. (Score:5, Insightful)
most industrial PC104 form factor PC's are running 386 processors.
The 386 is a 32-bit processor.
(There was a later variant called the 386SX that used a 16-bit bus, but it wasn't popular, and anyway the CPU was still 32-bit).
Re:32 bits alive and well. (Score:2)
Maybe AMD is dropping the lower bit processors, but Intel sure won't as long as there is a demand for them.
More than likely they'll leave them to the niche market. Via [via.com.tw], for instance, concentrates on the lower power-small footprint-minimal cooling market.I can see it (Score:5, Interesting)
(If there was a problem getting a good motherboard for the Opteron, that would be a good reason to still want Athlons, but there isn't a problem. There are plenty of good motherboards for Opteron and Athlon64 already.)
steveha
Amazing (Score:2, Troll)
They, IMHO, lost the Intel/AMD war because they tried to convince people that (truthfully or not) their processors, though with less MHz or GHz, were faster than Intel's. This may have been true but the average user just wants it to look good on paper. Likely the only reason they are turning a profit is because of the relative expensiveness of the new Intel processors compared to AMDs.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
(Bob) "Hey, Bill. I just got a new computer!"
(Bill) "I was thinking about getting a new one myself. Did you get one of those new Pentium 5 ones?"
(Bob) "Nope, one of the tech guys at work was telling me how those are only 32 bits, so I got one of these Athlon ones. They're 64 bits."
In the battle of bigger vs better, AMD has 64, Intel has 32. AMD introduced the model numbers for precisely the reason you raised - the average user has no idea what actually influences performance. The new AMD CPUs are set to ramp up in clock frequency very quickly, which will cause the model numbers to shoot up fast as well. What you'll end up with is Average Joe Consumer looking at Athlon64 4400+ & Pentium(?) 4Ghz. AMD is likely to pump up the "Their's is 32, our's is 64!" marketing, and regardless of whether the consumer has any clue whatsoever what that means, it makes AMD look better on paper.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, so go ask Average User how fast the CPU in the HP Pavilion 3000+ is. Odds are they'll say 3.0 GHz, which isn't true but is proof of AMD's success in "looking good on paper".
The issue that AMD has long had is poor motherboards. Via had a long, long time with poor chipsets/drivers which lead to crashes (this pretty much ended with the KT133A, but it's popped up every now and then since). They also had issues with MS not including the drivers for the chipsets with the OS (which is a death knell, especially for something like a motherboard -- the boards worked without the drivers, but they were dog slow). They also had some thermal problems, which were wonderfully overhyped by the hypemasters at Tom's Hardware (no, I won't provide a link -- if you don't know it you're better off).
Nowadays those issues are in the past. Nvidia has been producing rock solid motherboards for over a year now. Via has finally worked out its issues as well. Via even has chipset support in XP (and Win2k/ME IIRC). Anyone who spouts heat issues is an idiot -- Intel chips now have higher power consumption and heat dissipation than AMD does at the same effective processor speed.
AMD's had issues breaking into corporate PCs though, and still does. Most PCs sold for corporate use are Intel only. They've also had problems breaking into the notebook arena, and they're making a slow go of it in both areas. AMD has long had the enthusiast market, particularly the value-oriented gamers, but it's by no means a lock, and it's really not a very large market.
32-bit processors will still be around (Score:4, Informative)
The 32-bit processors will obviously be around for a long time yet but they just will not be made by AMD. Intel will keep making them and probably other companies such as VIA and that chinese 'red storm' company (can't recall the name of it) will make them for many years to come. The old 16-bit 286 processors are still made today, even though Intel stopped making them years ago.
Not to Worry.... (Score:2)
Itantium Heartburn (Score:2)
I can't think of anything more likely to give Intel heartburn than this.
Post Is Misleading (Score:2)
Yes, but, (Score:4, Interesting)
The real question is how long will it be before the BIOS is 64 bit protected mode?
Probably never.
I still write in 16 bit assembly because the BIOS still runs in 16 bit mode. It would be nice if AMD broke backward compatibility for once and started off with 64 bit firmware so I could at least write 64 bit assembly. The mixed-mode stuff (16 and 32 bit) that I would have to do for OS programming is getting ridiculous:
- I could write in 32 bit mode, if I wanted to write drivers for every single conceivable piece of hardware out there. While this would be ideal, it is far from possible. And since the processor starts in 16 bit mode, I'd still have to write at least a little real mode assembly.
- I could still use 32 bit mode if I wanted to use a call gate to call the 16 bit code of the BIOS, or:
- I can write 16 bit code, call the BIOS directly, and only have to worry about the 64k and 1M memory limitations.
I don't like any of these solutions, but it's a lot easier to fit kernel modules in 64k than it is to write call gates for BIOS services. The reason why I like using the BIOS is because it is standard across differing computers - I don't have to write a different driver for every single video card and hard disk controller that I might come across. Plus, if it uses the BIOS, I can be reasonably certain that it will run on an arbitrary PC; I don't have to do any hardware probing or detection.Well, it's a pipe dream, I guess.
Those of us who like to program their own hardware took a serious hit when the 32 bit OS became the standard. We either ended up jumping through hoops to use the 16 bit BIOS from protected mode, or we just decided not to use more than 1 megabyte of the machine's memory. If they had installed 32 bit BIOS's when the 32 bit processors came out, we would never have had these problems.
But no, we still have a 16 bit BIOS because the manufacturers are afraid that some fool might want to run DOS on their 3GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM....
Re:Yes, but, (Score:5, Informative)
Check out BIOS32 services. It's a 32-bit entrance for BIOS services, and it's an industry standard...
PDF link [phoenix.com]
Well, of course (Score:2)
The reality is that old processors get replaced by new ones, and once high-end chips end up as low-end chips - nobody buys K6s anymore. AMD's just saying that they'll continue phasing out old processors, leaving only 64-bit-capable ones.
AMD's current lineup spans K7-era chips at the low to mid range and K8s at the top. In two years, they'll have K8s at the low to mid range and K9s (or whatever) at the top.
AMD has a competitive 32-bit chip, w
Embedded Market (Score:2, Insightful)
The new via eden is attractive
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/031014/145512_1.html
h
Red storm rising (Cray & AMD) (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a 'news in brief' item, so no real details...
Simon
Re:Red storm rising (Cray & AMD) (Score:3)
Key point: Devs like 64-bit (Score:3, Insightful)
64 bit cpus are not a magic y2038 bullet ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If your filesystem only allocates 4 bytes to a timestamp, it's going to break in 2038, 64 bit cpu or not. Any file formats or structures that only allocate 4 bytes to a time value will have the same problem -- and there is a LOT of them out there. And to make matters worse, if you change the format to allocate 8 bytes to the timestamps, then it's almost certainly not going to be compatible with old software anymore.
Also, porting things to use 64 bit cpus rather than 32 bit cpus isn't particularly easy. Yes, you can run in `32 bit mode' and they'll work fine, but many (mostly C) programs work under the assumption that integers are 4 bytes and so are pointers. In a 64 bit cpu, running in a 64 bit mode, this is not true. This really isn't a big problem, however, as the AMD 64 bit cpus can and do emulate a 32 bit cpu as needed.
And we don't need 64 bit cpus to fix the problem anyways -- we could use 2 32 bit ints to store the time stamp if we wanted to. It's a bit more work, but it could certainly be done, even with 32 bit cpus.
Workstation memory and "Moore's Law" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Funny)
Now just how long have people been saying this?
IPv6 (Score:5, Funny)
64 bit PCs will be here long before IPv6 makes significant inroads in replacing IPv4. (Ducks out of way of ensuing flame war)
Re:IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, this is completely independent of things like memory bandwith tricks (I/O with multiple words at a time) and vector processing (operating on multiple words at a time). But that is orthogonal to the underlying word size. '256-bit GPU' is just a marketing term, that has nothing to do with the amount of memory it can address or the number of bits of precision of the arithmetic, which is what is really meant by the CPU word size.
Re:IPv6 (Score:3, Insightful)
'256-bit GPU' is just a marketing term, that has nothing to do with the amount of memory it can address or the number of bits of precision of the arithmetic...
Actually, what they mean by this is that the GPU can grab 256 bits in one bus cycle.
GPUs also use SIMD, which probably means that you can add 16 16-bit integers to 16 more 16-bit integers with signed saturation, or something like that, in the GPU.
You're right that the GPU can't address 2^256 bytes of memory and it doesn't use 256-bit integers
Re:Ohh yea? (Score:3)
Besides, the Yamhill extensions are supposedly AMD64 compatible...even Intel doesn't want to piss of the Beast of Redmond.
Re:Ohh yea? (Score:5, Insightful)
They haven't, and they wont, unless the Athlon64s begin to eat away at too much of Intel's market share. Intel's problem is that if it releases 64-bit extensions in Prescott, it will be forced to do so for the Xeon line as well. The problem with this is that it would send 10 years of research and development, along with countless Billions of dollars down the drain. Itanium relies on one thing and one thing only: a need for 64-bit processing. The few Itaniums that are selling will be the only ones sold if Intel's customers can get 64-bits on a Xeon.
Unless Intel is forced to, it's simply not going to do "64-bits on the cheap". Intel has nothing to gain by announcing or implementing 64-bit extensions now; we don't even know if the Athlon64s are going to sell. On the other hand, they have everything to lose if they do open up Prescott to 64-bit quickly. What Intel is probably doing now is scrambling to come up with ways to sell Itaniums to its customers once 64-bit Xeons are available. Itanium's miserable sales to date show that it has enough trouble just selling it as-is. Take away the one advantage it does have, and they may as well take it off the table now.
Aside from that, we have absolutely no idea how well Prescott's 64-bit extensions perform. We have no idea if they've been perfected, nor what kind of problems Intel has with them. We have no idea if bugs exist in the instructions, nor what sort of benefit we'd see from them. They could very well be based off of AMD's own 64-bit extensions (Intel has licensed the technology), which would make it rather embarassing to release them to the public. It would also constitute a huge and embarassing shift in position on the topic of 64-bits for home; something Intel has publicly stated is not something the market currently needs.
I'm not saying Intel wouldn't possibly announce 64-bit instructions in the near future - it could be tommorrow for all I know. All I'm saying is that everything points to Intel keeping the 64-bit extensions under wraps for as long as absolutely possible. As of right now, the only 64-bit instruction sets we know of (when it comes to Intel/AMD), are EPIC for Itanium and the ones from AMD. It's doubtful that Intel has secretly developed a whole brand new instruction set just for the P4, and it's even more doubtful that they somehow rigged the P4 to use Itanium's 64-bit instruction set. Thus, we're left with Intel banking on limited adoption of AMD's 64-bit CPUs, which does not appear to be the case thus far.
P.S. All signs point to Intel releasing the first handfull of Precotts around Feb of 2004, with volume closer to early Q2. Solving voltage leaks that push your operating temp to extremes isn't something you throw a bandaid on; it's something you design around. I just hope, for Intel's sake, that they aren't rushing Prescott out the door as they have on other chips [com.com] (P3 1.13GHz).
Re:Itanium wouldn't go away if Xeon had 64-bit add (Score:3, Insightful)
And how much does that cost? As I said, the Opteron isn't designed to compete with the Itanium at this level. When you're looking for a comparison, you really need to look at the sub-$25,000 market to see where Opteron's upper-end target resides. Where Opteron will really shine is in the blade market. The low-power chips due out shortly are going to bring a whole new level of perfor
Re:Learn to write (Score:2)
Disregard that last (Score:2)
Re:Learn to write (Score:3, Funny)
Power consumption (Score:2)
if your 64 bit processor runs the same as your 32 bit one and has 64 bit instructions why would you still use a 32 bit ?
I'm assuming that a 32-bit processor draws less current than a 64-bit processor, which becomes important for handheld devices.
Re:Go AMD! (Score:2)
Yep, mine came in yesterday!
In Intel's defense however... I could have (almost) sworn that (at one time at least) they had freely available PDF's of all their manuals available for download. Maybe that's no the case anymore, or maybe my memory is playing tricks with me... but I sure thought they used to be available...
Re:Go AMD! (Score:2)
> manuals (4 nice books) freely to anyone in US and
> Canada? Did you?
Did you know that Intel had free manuals years before the AMD64 was introduced? Did you!? And did you know that they are NICE manuals that are carefully packed, unlike my AMD64 manuals which are flimsy and arrived with water damage? Did you!?
How can you say that? (Score:2, Interesting)
How can you say that with a strait face? Doesn't that sound just a little bit like "no one will ever need more than 64k of ram"? ALL technology has built-in obsolescence. It probably won't be in three years like AMD wants us to believe, but 32 bit systems will eventually be obsolete, just like the horse drawn buggy you will only be able to find them in museums and in the basements of fanatic collectors. I feel like writing a cron job that will remind me to look you
Re:How can you say that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because he actually knows what he's talking about. Here's a hint: the market for 8-bit processors is absolutely enormous even today. There's even a small but significant market for 4-bit processors. Do a little research.
(I can't believe the parent post is modded +3, Interesting.)
Re:How can you say that? (Score:3, Insightful)
The market for 8-bit chips is already starting to disapear. Why? Not because they are no longer useful, but because t
Re:How can you say that? (Score:3, Funny)
God forbid the day Motorola stops making 68K chips.
Reading too much into a comment. (Score:3, Insightful)
Old microprocessors never die (Score:3, Funny)
Old microprocessors never die. They just end up embedded
Hmmm. That's strange, I don't see something like this in those "Old xxx never die" lists. Looks like a new one
Old microprocessor engineers never die. They just end up embedded.
Re:Why do we need 64 bit? (Score:2)
If this doesn't excite you, then you don't need 64-but computing. Many people don't, you may be one of them -- that's OK, just please sit quietly and wait until the rest of us come up with enough memory-hogging apps to fix that for ya
Re:Why do we need 64 bit? (Score:2)
Why do I need 64 bit computing?
You probably don't.
However, the cost of a 64 bit machine will be about the same as a 32 bit machine, so why buy an old technology when you can buy a newer one that will last longer.
Re:64 isn't fast enough (Score:3, Interesting)