Intel Shifting 64-bit Plans

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.

saw it coming

Well we all saw this one coming with all the delays on the Itanium.

Re:saw it coming

Wasn't Windows NT for Alpha "true" 64 bit Windows...

Re:saw it coming

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

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

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.

Re:saw it coming

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

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

is solaris ported to this baby and theres 64 bit goodness for everyone!!

saw it coming

Well we all saw this one coming with once we looked at the opteron.

(Really, it kicks serious bootay)

64 bits of nothingness

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

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.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

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

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.

er...

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.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

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.

Re:64 bits of nothingness

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

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

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

Re:64 bits of nothingness

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

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

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

Well, Duh...

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

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.

Re:Itanium is not being replaced

The worlds largest computer company is in the process of migrating their whole HP-UX line

Of course, to the best of my knowledge, * IBM [google.com] * doesn't have much of an HP-UX line, so I can't imagine this migration you speak of is a very big undertaking.

Will Microsoft leave AMD waiting at the altar?

I'm afraid that we'll see Microsoft leave AMD waiting at the altar for the Win64 OS only for AMD to find out that MS has eloped with Intel for their 64 bit X86 variant.

I doubt that the US justice department and antitrust will have any bearing on such a move.

Anyone else?

Re:Will Microsoft leave AMD waiting at the altar?

The AMD64 veriant of of XP is still in beta, the only thing that seems to be holding it back is a 64-bit version of the .NET framework. Though I've been wondering lately if the delay is not the coding, but some more political, along the lines of "Intel and Microsfot are proud to announce the first 64-bit consumer desktop. Oh and *cough* support for AMD too".

Too bad they introduced LaGrande first

While I would love to own one of these, unless Intel releases chips with CT (the 64-bit stuff) and not LT (LaGrande Technology - Palladium/TCPA "security" support), I will be sticking with what I have or buying a PowerPC (GNU/Linux either way). Hopefully LT will be optional like HyperThreading is now, but given that many of the "features" it enables require control of the majority of the market, I seriously doubt it.

Will AMD benefit?

Does anyone have any real reason to suspect that Intel will build CPUs that are completely compatible with AMD-64 architecture?

I am sure that AMD pays Intel for x86 and MMX/SSE licenses, just wondering if Intel will use the AMD design for the 64-bit extension. If so, I think we can all rest easy that AMD will be producing CPUs for a very long time, with all the benefits of competition for the consumer.

ps-- in case AMD is listening, I plan replacing my 1333 MHz T-bird/KT133A machine with an A64/socket 939 machine. Thanks for providing superior performance in the sub-US$200 CPU market for so long. As long as you continue to do so, you will always have a loyal fan base among us mere mortals.

64-bit rant [move along]

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 as an OS they can run on it...

Sure it would take time and money but in the end you don't make a bloatware cpu to run the hugeass x86 instructions with all the tacked on do-dahs...

Tom

Re:64-bit rant [move along]

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]

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.

Re:64-bit rant [move along]

>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.

Compatable?

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?

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.

hehehe

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!"

Itanic

Rose: I'll never let go Jack...
Jack: Are you smoking crack woman? I'm getting off this POS! You can stay with Craig! [intel.com]

RIP Itanic -- cpu buyers win

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 will remain inexpensive -- unless you buy that OS and office suite that end up costing more than the hardware, but you wouldn't do that because you know better, right? :)

Re:RIP Itanic -- cpu buyers win

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.