More Details Emerge on AMD's Hammer

Diabolus writes "Anandtech have more information on AMD's upcoming Hammer processors. " Talking with several engineers who are in the know about it, the Hammer looks pretty frickin' amazing. Itanium will have a run for its money, I suspect.

And NetBSD already runs on it

[jacexpo069]

Even before the processor is out, NetBSD already runs on it. See here [netbsd.org]

Re:Corporate monopolies stopping progress

[Reality Master 101]

I remember in the late 50's and the 1960's, when computing technologies were dominated by the Universities and the public ethos was uppermost. Freedom of information reigned, and thousands of little computing groups competed to bring the new era.

What the hell are you talking about? Can you say "IBM"? That was the era of "you can have any color you want as long as its blue", unless you went with one of the seven dwarfs. Universities didn't contribute jack to anything. IBM invented just about everything during that time.

Unix, Multics, CP/M, Hard Drives, the Mouse, CRT displays, all these and more were made during this time.

...by corporations. Perhaps you've heard of AT&T (Unix, Multics)? Hard drives -- IBM. CRT -- who knows. Mouse -- this might have actually been invented at a university, I can't remember.

The socialist control of the means of production of hardware will allow for innovation in that realm, just as the socialist control of the means of production in software has i thanks to the GNU liscence.

Yeah, I know this proves it was a troll, but just in case anyone was going to believe any of that historical bullshit.

Re:Backwards compatability big advantage

[jmauro]

Itanium can run un-modified x86 and in certain cases PA-RISC binaries unmodified. Look at the specs, there was no clean break. Intel learned with the i960 and the 8080 that clean breaks are not liked by those designing the systems at all. The x86 stayed around and will continue to stay around for as long as Intel stays around. Intel will have nothing else.

ISA = Instruction Set not the ISA bus

[vondo]

This has nothing to do with what bus is supported. Hammer is continuing and expanding on the x86 instruction set. It has nothing to do with the old ISA (Industry Standard Architecture bus).

Motherboard makers are free (or not) to put an ISA bus on the board. I'd be surprised at the time of Hammer to see such a board, though

Re:Hammer will rock!

[jacexpo069]

However, NetBSD was the first OS on it. See here for the Wasabi press release [wasabisystems.com]

State of the Linux port

[thorsen]

I have been working for SuSE Labs on the X86-64 port for about a year now, and I thought you might be interested in hearing about the state of the port.

Back in march we saw the first printf ("Hello World\n") succeed in the simulator. This is quite a big thing because it needs a working compiler, binutils, glibc and kernel. Since then we have steadily improved the system. By now we're running a full fledged Linux system in the simulator. The system is partly 64 bit and partly 32 bit. We will use the native 32 bit capabilities of the chip to use 32 bit binaries when that makes the most sense (who needs a 64 bit ls when a 32 bit ls does 64 bit filesystems fine).

By now gcc (C and C++ support), binutils, glibc, gdb, the kernel, ncurses, bash, util-linux, vim etc. have all been ported almost completely. And X runs happily in 64 bit too. Now we need the desktop systems, apache, databases etc.

Shameless plug: I'm giving a one-hour talk about Linux on X86-64 at Linux World Frankfurt next tuesday, october 30th. Here I'll show the system running, give an overview of what porting Linux is and describe the new features for Linux that we have implemented.

Bo Thorsen,
SuSE Labs.