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Intel Hardware

Intel Shifting 64-bit Plans 462

Posted by CowboyNeal from the kicking-it-up-a-notch dept.
OS24Ever writes "News.com has an article stating that 'Intel plans to demonstrate a 64-bit revamp of its Xeon and Pentium processors in mid-February--an endorsement of a major rival's strategy and a troubling development for Intel's Itanium chip' Is this the end of Itanium?" Looks like the rumors were true.
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Intel Shifting 64-bit Plans More

Intel Shifting 64-bit Plans

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  • saw it coming (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Afrosheen ( 42464 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:06PM (#8131505)
    Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.

    • Re:saw it coming (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fshalor ( 133678 )
      We all saw this comming when the whole bit shifting thing started.. And we all know how hard it is to shift bits reliabely.

      Yes, operton has done well, and intel's lagging behind. I am looking foward to a 64 bit version of the Xeon though. Perhaps the oppertunity cost for Intel's 64 bit set got a bit great with the techniqies they've been using?

      I still feel that P IV's aren't that great, and that celeron's haven't scaled well either, but are good for certain specific uses.

      Time will tell. And then there's

      • Re:saw it coming (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Smitty825 ( 114634 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:42PM (#8131739) Homepage Journal
        Wasn't Windows NT for Alpha "true" 64 bit Windows...

      • Re:saw it coming (Score:5, Interesting)

        by obeythefist ( 719316 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:48PM (#8131781) Journal
        And then there's the whole no true 64 bit windows yet

        The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.

        If you think about it, it's really very convenient for Intel, and MS hasn't bothered to give any good reason for the delay (especially when you consider that Linux has been available in 64bit land for aeons).

        • Re:saw it coming (Score:5, Informative)

          by forkazoo ( 138186 ) <wrosecrans AT gmail DOT com> on Friday January 30, 2004 @01:28AM (#8132395) Homepage
          As somebody who has worm a *lot* of tin foil hats...

          The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.

          I have to point out than Windows Server 2003 64 bit edition is currently a free download from MS's website, and comes with a one year free trial.

          I have it installed. I rather like it. But, it's damn well not ready for prime time. It couldn't pick up the ethernet on my Athlon64 without some headaches. Lots of people are having trouble with SATA. There is no hardware 3D, even with the latest detonators. My sound hardware apparently has no driver support of any sort.

          Seriously, it just isn't ready. MS is doing some respectable things with 2k3. No stupid luna theme, IE is way locked down by default, and it bitches at you if you try a weak administrator password. (it's even pickier than Linux about what it calls 'weak')

          Linux is in a much better state. Fedora Core .96 for AMD64 picked up my ethernet right off, and my sound seems to work for playing, but I haven't gotten it to record anything. The detonators are still a work in progress... I hear reports of people getting them running, but I have no luck.

          And yes, I really do mean that I wear a lot of tin foil hats. I even visited the Periodic Table Table whilst wearing one. I got into a discussion with Theodore Gray about the purity of the aluminium in 'Tin Foil' Hats, while I was at Wolfram research. I own a VAX, an Athlon 64, and I've made a pilgrimage to the periodic table table. Do I get a Karma bonus?

        • Re:saw it coming (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Crypto Gnome ( 651401 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @01:43AM (#8132479) Homepage Journal
          The tinfoil hat crowd would happily tell you that the reason there's no 64 bit windows is because Microsoft knew about this a long time ago and deliberately held off releasing Win64 technology because of some shady business dealings with Intel.

          Just because they're "the tinfoil hat crowd" doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong.

          Microsoft has a long and dirty history of colluding with Intel in the interests of their own mutual benefit to the exclusion of the rest of the industry.
    • Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.

      You mean Merced?

      We saw this coming with the Yamhill [chip-architect.com] rumors.

      And where would we be without stupid pundits? [zdnet.com]

    • Re:saw it coming (Score:5, Insightful)

      by calidoscope ( 312571 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @01:52AM (#8132531)
      Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.

      And the repositionings...

      Besides the delay, the biggest mistake that Intel made with the Itanic was the idea that the Itanic was a server/workstation processor and not for the desktop. The whole reason that the x86 exists as a server processor is that it is cheap due to massive economies of scale and that a scheissload of software has been written for the x86. Because the Itanic is a niche processor, Intel will both lose out on economies of scale and will have a vastly reduced portfolio of applications written for it.

      AMD has made a strong commitment to the desktop market with the Athlon 64 (and low-end Opterons), thus greatly increasing the market for AMD-64 software (which will need to include first rate compilers). They'll be able to spread development costs over a larger number of chips - which will result in less expensive chips.

      IBM now has the Mac for expanding the market for the Power processors. Sun has the UltraSparc IIe and IIIi processors for the volume market.

      Also remember that low cost 64 bit systems require low cost memory, especially in the larger sizes. Resonably priced 2 GB DIMM's have been available for maybe the last month, 4 GB DIMM's are still outrageously high price.

  • They talk about concerns (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:07PM (#8131515)
    For "potential Itanium customers".

    But based on their sales figures, it looks like they really aren't any.

    If they had their heads in the right places, they'd heavily go after CT.

  • now all we need (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:08PM (#8131524)
    is solaris ported to this baby and theres 64 bit goodness for everyone!!
    • I imagine this process is well underway, and nearing completions for the Solaris 10 release.

      Meanwhile a port of HP-UX is imminent if the Itanium tanks. Take the x86 port effort + 64-bit clean IA64 version and mix together and you get the Opteron optimized version (well, it's a wee bit more complicated than that...)

      So we'll have Darwin, *BSD, Linux, HP-UX (probably), Solaris, Windows NT 5.2, zow! All that's left is for Apple to port the GUI, and we'll have a cool platform for the future.

  • 64 bits of nothingness (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cybermint ( 255744 ) * on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:09PM (#8131530)
    Until a 64-bit version of Windows comes out, I don't see this mattering all that much. 64-bit doesn't mean anything to the masses of end users, just the developers. I don't care if my computer is 2-bit or 1000-bit as long as it works well.

    • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:4, Insightful)

      by vijayiyer ( 728590 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:18PM (#8131593)
      I'm tired of seeing this kind of rubbish. People who do real work on their computers (e.g., engineers and scientists) need 64 bit computing. For example, the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software we used at my company required 64 bit precision for accuracy. That would be painfully slow on a 32 bit machine. Not everybody compiles Linux kernels all day.
      • So what did you do with all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use?

        They don't 'need' 64-bit machines, the machines were built before the software was written. It is the way things work...

        • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:5, Informative)

          by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:32PM (#8131685) Homepage
          People would rent time on huge (and hugely expensive) supercomputing centers; greatly simplify the models, knowing they introduce oversimplifications and errors; or, simply, not do the modeling they really wanted to do at all. A friend is working in a chip design company, and his simulations regularily run over an entire weekend, despite the hefty hardware they have.

          In some areas (like climate modeling and some kinds of neural simulations), people can _still_ not do the kind of modeling they would really like to do, 64 bit clusters or not.

        • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:5, Interesting)

          by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:34PM (#8131693)
          So what did you do with all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use?
          ---
          When all they had was a 286 @ 16MHz, they didn't do large-scale simulations of molecules on the computer, or design airplanes mostly on the computer. 64-bit machines already exist, and the software to take advantage of them already exists --- people want to be able to do the things they do on current 64-bit machines on commodity hardware.
        • He was probably running a real computer and not some damn x86 toy. 64-bit computing has been available for over a decade. What the grandparent really wants is the price/performance advantage that comes with commodity hardware, so he can do his fluid dynamics computations cheaper.

        • er... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by rebelcool ( 247749 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:49PM (#8131787)
          all you had was a 286 @ 16 MHz to use

          That would be one sad little lab. At the time the 286 was around, there were plenty of (dozens in fact) of scientific computing architectures vastly more advanced than the 286. They cost quite a bit more, too.

          It wasn't really until the Pentium Pro came around that the processor architecture in 'mainstream' PC computing had caught up to the big boys. Since then, intel and AMD have largely been driving the cutting edge. This drove alot of them out of business, but even today there are niche markets who need serious I/O performance that intel machines don't deliver.

        • They don't 'need' 64-bit machines, the machines were built before the software was written. It is the way things work...

          I think, perhaps, that the word "need" is the wrong word. It's more a question of demand than of need. After all, it could be said that nobody has a "need" of anything more than a bit of raw meat and a cave to hide in.

      • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thesupraman ( 179040 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:42PM (#8131740)
        You mean you are running integer CFD Code??

        Amazing!

        All the CFD Codes I run here I run in double precision floating point. (sometimes single precision when the situation allows..)

        It must be some pretty funky code to be interger, never come across any real CFD code yet that is..

        I mean, 90+% of the runtime of our CFD codes are spent in LAPACK, etc.. so we use the (nery nice) intel optimised versions (ASCII Red was not just a hardware project you know..) which do very very well..

        Basically, I call BS!

        If you are using some integer codes, then you are the only people I've ever heard of in the industry who are.. it must be very painfull!

        And intel CPU's are really quite good at 80bit FP.. especially with the right libraries.
        • I don't recall the parent saying anything about using Integer CFD code. He said that he ran CFD codes and that 64 bit was more efficient for his codes than 32 bit. That is very likely true. Even if on your 32 bit platforms your double precision fp numbers are 64 bit representations, most 64 bit platforms have more fp registers than you see on 32 bit platforms. This means less swapping between registers and memory, hence more efficient floating-point code.
          • Lemme guess... you haven't even read the post you're defending. Right?

            The parent post very literally said that he needed 64 bit precision. Capisci? Not more registers, not a 64 bit architecture, not even 64 bit addressing. Precision.

            In which case, yes, it's one mother of all bogus arguments.

            Unless you're using _integers_, the x86 FPUs already gave you not only 64 bit floats, they gave you _80_ bit floats. Even in the 16 bit ages, since someone mentioned the 286, you still had an 80 bit FPU.

            Guess it just

        • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:4, Funny)

          by The Munger ( 695154 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @12:33AM (#8132015) Homepage
          These spoilt young hooligans! Back in the day when I coded CFD, we used 4-bit processors and strung them together by the serial port to make the necessary precision. Even then, it was in integers so we had to work out the decimal places by hand and type them on the end!

          And we enjoyed it!

        • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:5, Interesting)

          by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @12:35AM (#8132026)
          I just did some work porting CFD code from IRIX to an Opteron system running Linux. The processor had to be 64 bit because some of the runs we do now require 15 GB of RAM.

          I only did the porting work - I only have a vague understanding of how CFD works. So I can't say what percent of the runs require more than 4 GB of RAM, but I've gotten the impression that most runs require over 2 GB of RAM, which is enough to complicate things with a 32 bit OS.

      • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:55PM (#8131820) Homepage Journal
        I'm tired of seeing this kind of rubbish. People who do real work on their computers blah blah blah...

        Suck my ass. I'm sick of seeing pompus assholes denigrating other people's uses of their computers. The work that the rest of us do is just as real as the work that engineers and "scientists" do. My Ray Tracing and rendering would be helped immensely by 64 bit computing.

        Just because I'm not modelling the movement of helium atoms in an excited state doesn't mean that I'm not doing "real work".

        If your modeling CFD, rendering, cracking RC5, or rewriting HL2, the work that you do is REAL to you!

        LK
      • software we used at my company required 64 bit precision for accuracy. That would be painfully slow on a 32 bit machine.

        Note, that all modern processors already have 64/128bit extensions, which most compilers will use. 64bit processors won't be any faster at double-precision FP operations.
    • http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/default.a sp

      Party on.

    • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pyro226 ( 715818 ) <Pyro226 @ h o t m ail.com> on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:27PM (#8131647) Journal
      I don't care if my computer is 2-bit or 1000-bit as long as it works well.

      I don't care if my computer is 100 MHz or 3 GHz as long as it runs fast. But the point is that a 3GHz computer will almost certainly run things faster than a 100 MHz computer. I don't know anything about writing software, but speed increases still interest me, and if 64 bit computing provides a speed increase then the end user will care. Even if 64 bit computing just allows for more than 4 Gigs of RAM it will become imporant to the end user in a couple of years when LongHorn XP Ultra-Professional demands at least 8 Gigs of RAM.

      For the record, I use a Pentium I with 64 Megs of RAM almost every day.

      • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:5, Funny)

        by cujo_1111 ( 627504 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:31PM (#8131682) Homepage Journal
        But the point is that a 3GHz computer will almost certainly run things faster than a 100 MHz computer.

        You have fallen into the Intel trap.

        There is an exit to your north, it is guarded by a man in a spacesuit.

        You have:
        - A wallet

        • Re:64 bits of nothingness (Score:5, Funny)

          by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @08:38AM (#8133966) Journal
          There is an exit to your north, it is guarded by a man in a spacesuit.

          You have:
          - A wallet
          : look

          There is a PowerPC processor in the corner.

          : Get processor

          Taken.
          The man in the spacesuit fidgets uncomfortably.

          : Use processor

          You have no software that can run on this processor.
          The man in the spacesuit laughs at your predicament.
          A geek has also fallen into the intel trap.

          : Look geek

          He is pasty-skinned and bearded. He seems to shun the light.

          : Talk geek

          The geek says loudly ,"IBMAMDVIATRANSMETA".
          The man in the spacesuit screams and departs the room!
          The geek leaves the room, giggling.

          There is something on the floor near where the geek was standing.

          :look floor

          There is a a rewriteable CD on the floor.
          :get CD

          Taken.

          :look CD

          On closer inspection you notice the CD has been labelled "YellowDog" with a marker pen.

          :go north

          You are in a maze of twisty processor lines, all alike. There is a lot of hype here.

          :quit

          are you sure? (y/n) y

    • The move away from ia32 would be a positive one, on the condition that AMD didn't do retarded things in x86-64. It is my understanding that it is a b!tch to design and validate a high-performance ia32 chip because of all the complexities. IIRC, several years ago, at a time when Intel was pending billions in R&D for the next chip, the R&D budget on all the big iron RISC chips didn't add up to Intel's ia32 development, many of them beating Intel. AMD has to spend the big bucks too, although I imag
    • Why does the fact that there's no 64-bit version of Windows available to the public change anything? 64-bit's big win will be in the server market, where it allows things like holding a database larger than 4GB in memory (without ugly hacks, anyway). Of course, with Free software, taking advantage of the expanded limits and other new features, like the extra registers in x86-64, is almost trivial - some features, like extra registers, can be utilized with just a recompile; other features, like the ability

      • Exactly. PostgreSQL on an Opteron server, as an example, is a pretty darn good deal. Linux and PostgreSQL are ready today. Unfortunately AMD is wasting their opportunity to really pitch Opteron servers running Linux. They are waiting for a 64 bit Windows to arrive for x86-64, and you can bet that the needed Windows won't arrive until Microsoft and Intel can make a joint announcement.

    • For servers, addressing with more than 32 bits is crucial these days. The question is - how do you get performance improvement on a desktop ?

      The real performance gain is in the change of ISA (instruction set architecture). True, calling it 64-bit vs. 32-bit is pretty much a marketing paint. The real issue with x86 is not even the fact that it's CISC - it's the number of registers. Few general-purpose registers means that you have to go to memory A LOT. x86 has 8 GPRs - the compiler can barely allocate 2 or
    • Surprisingly, the increasing heavy use of multimedia on home computers is a GREAT reason why 64-bit X86-64 CPU-based systems could have a surprisingly big impact on home computing.

      32-bit computing today maybe fine for business tasks and surfing the Internet, but when you start doing things like processing images from digital still cameras (especially now with increasing file sizes from digital still cameras that have five megapixel or higher resolution sensors) or downloading movies from your MiniDV/MicroD

  • Well, Duh... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by forkazoo ( 138186 ) <wrosecrans AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:09PM (#8131533) Homepage
    Intel has already publicly admitted to having X86 processors with 64 bit extension in development. Also, take a look at microsoft, who refer to X86-64 as "64 bit extended architecture."

    Everybody and his brother figured out long ago that Itanium is not something that will penetrate effectively into the desktop market. It's hot, expensive, incompatible, etc. It requires a ton of work to get code running smoothly on Itanium. Th only amazing thing is how long it took intel to admit that it had egg on its face!

  • Itanium is not being replaced (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:10PM (#8131535)
    No, this does not signal that Itanium is doomed. Have a look at www.spec.org [spec.org] and look at the CPU2000 scores. Itanium is starting to kick some serious tail.

    However Itanium is not a desktop chip-- its too big. 64-bit x86 will be a consumer product for desktops.

    • I agree. I think Itanium will catch on given two things happen: first, Intel needs to lower the price - I just bought a 1U server and would have loved to have gotten an Itanium - but it's prohibitively expensive compared to P4s or Xeons. Second, the x86 emulation is going to have to improve if Itanium is going to gain acceptance as a desktop cpu (granted if this happens, there will likely be an Itanium clone much line athlon-64 and the opteron). Otherwise I think Itanium is likely to go the way of alphas
    • I suspect your probably right. 64 bit x86 is what Intel is going to use to counter the appalling sales pitch that "We're selling you a 64 bit processor while that Intel based machine only has a 32 bit processor". That's going to be heard far and wide once they find themselves being compared to Apple G5's and Opteron based systems. Itanium wasn't going to be the chip that helped that situation. What little most consumers have heard about it wasn't good regardless of whether or not it was true or fair (and i
    • Certainly not if HPaq has anything to say about it. The worlds largest computer company is in the process of migrating their whole HP-UX line from PA-RISC to Itanium. [hp.com]
    • No, this does not signal that Itanium is doomed. Have a look at www.spec.org and look at the CPU2000 scores. Itanium is starting to kick some serious tail.

      However Itanium is not a desktop chip-- its too big. 64-bit x86 will be a consumer product for desktops.

      Itanium is dead if Intel makes a 64bit Xeon. Itanium might have done well in competition with the Opteron because the Opteron is from AMD, not Intel. When the Itanium goes up against a 64bit Xeon, both from Intel, as long as Intel doesn't cripple i
    • No, this does not signal that Itanium is doomed.

      I have to agree. What really signals that Itanium is doomed is the fact that no one is buying it.

      But you gotta dig the irony: Intel is making an AMD-compatible processor.

      One seriously cannot underestimate the significance of binary compatibility. Nowadays The external ISA is a silly detail anyway. Any processor worth the silcon it was made on has a RISC microarchitecture.
      • "What really signals that Itanium is doomed is the fact that no one is buying it."

        That's funny. Itanium sold over 100,000 cpus last year which is a big number for the enterprise server market. That's more than some other major RISC processors sold in 2003 (like Power 4).
        Just because it's too expensive for you and your LAN-party gamer buddies to buy on your allowance, doesn't mean serious businesses doing big serious tasks wouldn't we willing to spend a lot of money (but less than they do on IBM and Sun
    • I'd still be looking at how many people buying it, benchmarks seems to be showing more heat than light [theregister.co.uk] regarding how good or not Itanium is.

      Xix.

  • Same bullshit...different company..

    Blah blah blah, 64-bit processor....billions of GB of ram....

    The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

    I mean yeah it sucks to change ISA but this is what you do. Write a *free* backend to GCC for your ISA and have it merged into the tree. Then pay small group of Gentoo folk to create a port of Gentoo to your ISA.

    Net result is a ISA everyone can develop for [re: audience] as well

    • Re:64-bit rant [move along] (Score:4, Insightful)

      by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:24PM (#8131636)
      The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

      I thought we settled this back in the early 90s, there is no such thing as RISC versus CISC. The x86 is not CISC, the PPC is not RISC.

    • Re:64-bit rant [move along] (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomreagan ( 24487 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:30PM (#8131666)
      uhh, with all due respect, if we have learned anything in the past thirty years from the success of windows, unix, the as/400 and finally x86, it's that architectures are the hardest thing in the world to change due to the massive installed base, and that it's usually better to extend what you have.

      just look at os/2, the MCA bus, and now itanium. why would i migrate to a new ISA and lose all the software that I already have when I can just grow my current one?

      and x86 isn't that bloated, and cisc isn't that bad. just look at p4 vs. athlon - the tremendous clock speeds realized by the p4's use of an extended pipeline (which is a risc-like optimization) have a tremendous downside - you lose a lot of time resetting the cache if you miss a branch. so for interative programs, as opposed to massive number crunching (and that can be addressed cheaper using MPP and clustering), risc is something of a dog.

      finally, you can't say that the desktop is not important to itanium when the line between servers, workstations, and desktops gets blurrier all the time, and the largest growing segment of the market is the low-to-mid-size server.

      high-end servers may carry a premium price and have a higher margin, but like lenin said, quantity has a quality all its own.

      this is not good news for intel.
    • Umm.....Do you know anything at all about RISC vs. CISC? Or how modern processors operate?

      I'm sorry I have to be so blunt, but you don't seem to know any of the trade-offs to a RISC style platforms, nor do you know that modern processors are actually RISC/CISC hybrids of sorts which translate the legacy X86 code into a more easily executed kinds of code then execute the code as it's own language, achieving the processor side improvements of RISC, while maintaining the memory benefits of CISC...

    • Re:64-bit rant [move along] (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thesupraman ( 179040 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:35PM (#8131700)
      >The real question is have they finally dumped the
      >stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a
      >space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

      Ok, yeah, right, umm....

      You DO know that RISC processors generally take up a lot more memory space for a given program, have more instructions, and are often more complex to code for, right?
      (of course this assumes you know what a delay slot is, or have understood the pain of manually doing indirect addressing, managing register windows during interrupts, or managing implicit instruction skip flags, the joys of RISC!)

      I thought not..

      as for the energy argument - get with the 90's - everyone is using similar internal execution units anyway - this is a red heering.

      Of course, who am I to stand in the way of fashion..

      RISC in it's pure form has not existed for over 10 years now.. neither has CISC, for that matter.
      It's about the same as attacking russians for being communist.. it's just not that simple.

      The x86 instruction set and successfully covered the widest range of CPU performance ever, and is available in by far the most computers... I would suggest by just about any measure it is by far the most successful ever.

      Of course, there seems to be a group of people who cannot stand the pain of thinking about their python interpreter running x86 code internally, or the fact that gcc is generating that for them.
      I truly feel sorry for them - they suffer on while the rest of us just get-on-with-the-job(tm).

      Sigh.
    • The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

      Yeah, this happened like 10 years ago or so (RISC internaly, CISC externaly).
    • The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?

      Well, as others have pointed out, that's passe. But the Itanium is whole new fancy thing building on the lessons learned -- "EPIC" (explicitly parallel instruction computing, or some such).

      Sure it would take time and money but in the end [snip snip snip...]

      Yep, time and money but in the end. That's Intel's plan with Itanium, and they've still got some hope for it. In the me
    • space
      ---
      What kind of space? Have you seen the die size of an Alpha EV7???

      energy
      ---
      The same processor that takes up 150W at 1.25GHz?

      coding efficient
      ---
      RISC architectures generally take up more space. They take up 4 bytes per instruction, while x86 averages about 3.2 bytes per instruction. They also take more instructions overall, because the instructions do less.

      RISC set?
      ---
      There is no such thing as "RISC vs CISC" anymore. The "CISC" chips are all actually cores even more minimal than the average RISC chi
    • "The real question is have they finally dumped the stupid x86 instruction set in favour of a space/energy/coding efficient RISC set?"

      Now, don't take this as a troll, cus it isn't. I have Sun boxen, and PowerPC boxen at arms reach ATM, and I love them.

      RISC does not always mean fast! Nor does it mean anything else! In fact, for the sorts of problems that we are facing right now, X86 actually seems like a pretty sane choice of architecture.

      The company in question - Intel - sells at least a zillion proces

  • Compatable? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by petabyte ( 238821 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:20PM (#8131603)
    So the article doesn't really cover the issue I'm most curious about - are the x86-64 extensions (yamhill) compatable with AMD's Opteron or will they require different 64-bit binaries?

    • Re:Compatable? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:50PM (#8131795) Homepage
      From the article:

      However, Brookwood believes that Intel will wait for the appearance of Prescott's successor, called Tejas, which is due in early 2005. The reason for the wait, Brookwood believes, is that the Prescott designs were complete before Intel had access to AMD's approach, meaning that software tuned for one wouldn't work on the other.

      "They need that compatibility now," Brookwood said. "I believe that Tejas is coming so hard on Prescott's heels, (because) Tejas has the compatibility that is not in Prescott and Prescott derivatives."

      In other words, it does seem like it, though no definitive word from Intel itself, obviously.

    • So the article doesn't really cover the issue I'm most curious about - are the x86-64 extensions (yamhill) compatable with AMD's Opteron or will they require different 64-bit binaries?

      I suspect that Intel wants to jump on the bandwagon with AMD rather than releasing a 64-bit part that requires a THIRD version of windows. Even if they could convince MS to come up with "WIN64-yamhill", how long would it take? Every day AMD can sell the Opteron because it has x86-64 Windows and Intel can't sell Yamhill is an

    • Re:Compatable? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PlazMan ( 40335 )
      Intel started working on this years ago, but it got hushed up due to political issues between the Itanic team and the Prescott team. It's gotta be Opteron compatible at this point. If Intel management hadn't been stupid, then they could have announced their own x86-64 and put the hurt on AMD. At this point, their only option is to "embrace and extend".

  • hehehe (Score:3, Funny)

    by Sj0 ( 472011 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:21PM (#8131610) Journal
    I love it when companies lie out their asses for months until they can flip their strategy around.
    "Oh no, desktop users would never need 64 bit support! It's just not something a regular user ne-- CYKE! NOW HERE'S OUR LATEST AND GREATEST 64 BIT CHIP! PLEASE, NO CROWDING!"
  • This is fantastic news. AMD 64's are outselling Itanics by a huge margin. CPU buyers are demonstrating quite clearly that they want a good migration path. Itanic was such an inferior design that Intel is now forced to build a chip that is compatible with AMD's instructions.

    This means that we now will have another generation of chips from Intel and AMD whose instruction sets are compatible with each other. Prices will remain reasonable because there is competition. And in the 64-bit world, computers wi

    • Re:RIP Itanic -- cpu buyers win (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MonaLisa ( 190059 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:56PM (#8131828)
      Whatever, man. I have G5 and Itanium2 machines at my desk. The HP Itanium2 runs Linux and WinXP 64-bit edition (which came out last June). The Itanium2 (McKinley) is an old slow one that crushes the G5 easliy on everything (using Intel's compiler) by factors of 2-3x. The new Madison Itaniums are substantially faster (look at the SPEC CPU benchmarks). The Itanium is far superior to anything else out there, it just doesn't run x86 code all that fast, and the GNU compiler sucks on the Itanium because the optimzier cannot get the VLIW right. The Itanium is just ahead of its time. And most people are too stuck in the x86 mindset to even see it. CPU buyers lose as a result.

      • Itanium, or six megs of cache? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @11:22AM (#8135474) Homepage
        Stick six megs of cache on a Xeon, and if the Itanium still wins by a substantial margin, then I'll think that Intel hasn't wasted the last ten years and billions of dollars.

        Nothing wrong with sticking a lot of cache on a part -- everyone would, were it not for other issues such as cost -- but that Itanium is better than anything else does not follow.

        Itanium puts up impessive numbers, that I can't deny. I'd expect any competent architecture with that much raw die area thrown at the problem to do the same, though. There's little indication that any of the performance gains are due to the architecture of Itanium. In fact, there was an ISCA (?) paper by Intel which reported that major features of Itanium -- eg branch elimination through predication -- were worth a little if you hand-tuned, nil if you had a decent (intel) compiler, and negative if you didn't (gcc at the time).

        Which is all just a way of saying that Itanium is just another architecture. It tried some things that worked, some things that didn't, and in the end does well because the ones making it can throw tons of resources at the problem. "Ahead of its time"? No, because in the future, the same thing will be true.

  • ...Shifting? (Score:2, Funny)

    by siokaos ( 107110 )
    Anyone else find any irony in the title? Intel shifting 64 bit plans?
    • Anyone else find any irony in the title? Intel shifting 64 bit plans?

      Obviously intel has just come up with a faster way to write:

      shl edx,1
      shl eax,1
      setc ebx
      or edx,ebx
  • I can't imagine Intel is even breaking even now on the Itanium on the production costs alone, let alone the outrageous amount of money spent with HP on what is looking to be a huge boondoggle. How much longer will Intel bother producing? What unfortunate quarter will see a writedown for all Itanium development costs?
    • Prediction - Intel will spend more outrageous amounts of money ensuring that their new "Penteron64" outperforms the A64's on the market. They will produce vast amounts of Penterons, and release them exactly at the same time as the first 64-bit Windows XP is released.

      They will then spend vast amounts of money marketing their new product to PHB's, which will ensure they wrest back market share that AMD has taken while Intel has been sitting around with a finger up the you-know-what.

      I say, prepare for the o

  • Get MS off its ASS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:44PM (#8131757)
    Maybe this will help get MS off their asses to put out a 64 Bit OS for Non-Intel (i.e. x86-64) I have wondered why MS has drug itself so slow when they had an Itanium version some time ago soething contractual with Intel ?

    32 Bit vs 64 Bit MS operating systems , TWICE as many chances for bugs :)

  • What was it they used to say? (Score:3, Funny)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:44PM (#8131759)
    No one ever got fired when going w/Big Blue

    Check that...no one but a slew of Intel Engineers! :)

    .::. "Come close to me, Klingon, and let me die with my hands at your throat!" .::.

  • Put the Itanium out of it's misery (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Colonel Panic ( 15235 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @11:57PM (#8131830)
    The basic Itanium architecture has been around for something like 5 years now, hasn't it? And still nobody has managed to write a decent compiler for it. Sure, on paper it might be a very fast architecture, but if no one is able to actually take advantage of it's potential benefits, what good is it?

    hey, who moved my paneer?

  • Old news (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Groo Wanderer ( 180806 ) <charlie@@@semiaccurate...com> on Friday January 30, 2004 @12:04AM (#8131871) Homepage
    Forgive me if I get a little bored by this 'revelation', I wrote about it in September:

    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668

    And I followed it up a week later with this:

    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11781

    Ok, people seem to not taken me seriously then, so I'll reiterate. Prescott has 64 bit extensions built in. They use the AMD64 instruction set. This is because MS twisted their arm into it.

    The question of when they turn it on is more a political one than a technical one, and that I don't know the answer to right now, most likely because Intel does not know either. They are in one hell of a bind. If Prescott is 64 bit, why should I pay 5x as much for an Itanic again? Oh yeah, a marginal performance gain on FP code, but a loss on Int. Whoopty-#&%^#-ding-dong.

    It will be announced at IDF, count on that. When you can buy it, good question. My guess is that it will be an inticement for the first Prescott/EE buyers.

    -Charlie

    (As a self-plug, if you read the Inq, you would know these things :) )

  • 64-bit Isn't why Itanium is so great (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What differentiates Itanium2 from any Xeon is not the register width, but is the combintion the revoluationary EPIC architecture and auto parallelizing compilers.

    IA64 can speed through tasks that deal with 32-bit numbers and 32-bit addresses with great efficiency, and it will beat a similarly clocked Xeon hands down running native compiled code.

    Xeon + 64-bit registers is no threat to Itanium except in the minds of simpletons who look at the marketing bullets and say "gee, 64 sure is a big number!"
    • What differentiates Itanium2 from any Xeon is not the register width, but is the combintion the revoluationary EPIC architecture

       ...that turns out not to scale as well as originally hoped...

      and auto parallelizing compilers

       ...which don't exist yet.

      IA64 can speed through tasks that deal with 32-bit numbers and 32-bit addresses with great efficiency, and it will beat a similarly clocked Xeon hands down running native compiled code.

      Yeah, but that's not a fair comparison because you can get a 3.2 GHz

    • Re:64-bit Isn't why Itanium is so great (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hoof ( 448202 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @01:43AM (#8132476)
      Andy Glew (the designer of the Pentium Pro) on EPIC vs. normal architectures: [google.com]

      "Yes, but the IA-64 EPIC is not a modern architecture -
      it is a design by committee, with microarchitects who believed
      religious dogma instead of thinking.

      At least some modern microarchitectures have made optimization
      easier than in their predecessors. Apart from some egregious
      glass jaws (mea culpa), P6 was often less sensitive to optimization
      than the P5. The compiler folks complained that their unoptimized
      code often ran as fast as their optimized code.
      AMD's K7 and K8 continue in this vein.

      This is one of the reasons I jumped from Intel to AMD:
      the Intel P6 is philosophically a lot closer to the AMD K7 and K8
      than it is to the Intel Pentium 4 (Willamette, Prescott), or Itanium.
      Pentium 4 is fragile, just like Itanium."
  • Bottom line: Pushing 64-bit capability could help those chips approach the performance of Itanium. But that could leave the future of Itanium, which companies such as HP and Silicon Graphics are counting on, in limbo.

    Now there's a really dumb statement. If Pentium64 provides Itantium performance at a lower price with Microsoft software support -- then switch! It ain't that hard a decision. You're not losing anything here.

    And if P64 doesn't play well in multi-processing systems, then Itantium can con

  • Good Chips Can Die (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @12:56AM (#8132178)
    It doesn't matter if Itantium is better than AMD64, or Prescot64, or you name it -64. Alpha was better still, and it died. Itantium will die too because the other chips are good enough, and much cheaper. Intel will have to compete on price with AMD64, which makes Itantium a dead end.

  • This sucks, because ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kourino ( 206616 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @01:38AM (#8132450) Homepage
    See, hearing about things like this pisses me off.

    When I think of all the nice system lines that have died off because their parent companies decided "Well, we could just have Intel make our 64-bit chips, and then make money selling systems", and all the technically nice architectures that are basically dead now because of decisions like that (MIPS, Alpha, et. al) ... it's kind of depressing.

    I mean, I wouldn't mind if Itanium had been more successful. It was actually neat to think of Digital's EV8 team building SMT technology into Itanium. (Is this the work that's been manifested as HT on P4 on Xeon-class machines?) Especially since EPIC is supposed to make things so much different. But ... it hasn't taken off. The real pisser, though, is to think that the dominant 64-bit architecture of the future might essentially be i386 with more and bigger registers. Hopefully at least IBM will step in with its POWER-based solutions. Man, if I ever get drunk and start bitter rants, I swear it'll be about processor architectures ...

  • Intel has trouble admitting they are wrong (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sundling ( 92926 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @01:58AM (#8132559)
    Look at how many trouble Intel has trouble admitting they are wrong and following AMD on something. Intel is so used to AMD copycating them on everything, they don't seem to know how to deal with the shoe being on the other foot.

    So far Intel has followed AMD onto DDR memory, after dragging their feet for a year. Now it's happening with 64 bits. Next expect to see it with integrated memory controller, desktop dynamic power management(like quick 'n cool) and hypertransport. I'm sure when they come around the technologies might be similar, but they'll have some other name for it. Hopefully, Intel doesn't try the old Microsoft embrace and extend.

  • Dumb ass question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by multiplexo ( 27356 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:08AM (#8132784) Journal
    Will Intel's extensions to the x86 architecture be compatible with AMD's. Or will fat binaries that can execute in x86, x86-64 Intel and x86-64 AMD be necessary?

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