AMD fielding 64 bits for PCs (The Hammer challenges Itanium )

ZDNet News ^ | July 25, 2002, 5:00 AM PT | John G. Spooner Special to ZDNet News

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Advanced Micro Devices is building a 64-bit field of dreams.

As Intel accelerates the launch date of its 3GHz Pentium 4 chip, arch rival AMD continues to build the foundation for "ClawHammer." The 64-bit Athlon processor is expected to come out early next year, giving desktop PCs a performance similar to that of workstations used in research labs at DaimlerChrysler or NASA.

To make sure ClawHammer arrives on solid footing, AMD is working with a long list of partners who will build that hardware and software that can take advantage of such a chip. The company has already sent tens of PCs fitted with the upcoming chip to game developers and multimedia software creators, said John Crank, a senior branding associate for the Athlon. This is part of Operation Rolling Thunder, AMD's campaign to introduce the chip, he said.

AMD is, so far, the only major chipmaker to announce plans for a 64-bit chip for desktops.

"Just because it's there, we think people are going to use it," said Mark de Frere, AMD's Athlon brand manager.

Because of ClawHammer's 64-bit architecture--which gives the processor the ability to process twice as much data per clock cycle as current Athlon chips and allows consumer desktops to offer significantly larger amounts of memory than they do now--AMD asserts that the chip will usher in a new class of high-performance games and other complex applications such as video editing and voice recognition.

There's one catch, though. The average PC user probably doesn't need 64 bits just yet.

One of the crucial benefits of 64-bit chips is that they can manage more than 4GB of memory. But top-of-the-line PCs have only just recently topped 1GB, and few industry watchers believe consumers will need more than 4GB of memory in their systems for at least a few years. Fitted with current 32-bit chips, 4GB is the limit of what PCs can handle.

"You're just now seeing people put over 1GB (of RAM) in their machines," said Chris Hecker, who develops games for Oakland, Calif.-based Definition Six. "It's not likely that someone is going to write a game in the near future that pushes the (4GB) envelope. But clearly it's going to happen eventually."

AMD agrees to some extent that it will take time to establish a base of 64-bit customers. However, the company points out, demand for greater performance and more memory always increases, despite what experts predict, especially in market segments like PC gaming.

Is there a need?
The move to 64 bits has proven necessary for high-end workstations and servers, which are used to maintain huge databases or to create industrial designs. Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems all make 64-bit chips for workstations and servers, but those chips require completely different hardware and software than that found on consumer PCs.

Next year, AMD will also release the 64-bit Opteron, a sister chip to ClawHammer, for servers.

Intel maintains that 64 bits will be unnecessary in desktop PCs for some time.

But AMD says 64 bits can benefit consumers, making games more realistic with more lifelike characters and settings. Games can take advantage of the ability to move more data by tapping the ClawHammer's 64-bit-wide registers, which can handle twice as much data at once as current 32-bit chips like the Athlon XP.

More intense games will also undoubtedly require more memory, another reason AMD says 64 bits will sell. Games could also be written to run faster by loading completely into memory, then automatically expanding data caches--stores which hold often-used information--to fill the available memory space.

AMD isn't focused solely on games, though. The company asserts that peer-to-peer computing, new operating systems with more intense graphical interfaces, and applications such as voice recognition and video editing will also boost the need for performance, which can be delivered by the 64-bit chip, and will increase minimum requirements for memory in PCs.

Most new PCs come with 256MB or 512MB of RAM right now, but memory capacities are constantly increasing. Every year, memory manufacturers increase RAM chips' capacity to store data. By virtue of technology improvement alone, AMD asserts, PCs with 4GB or more of memory will begin arriving in 2004.

"We think that the average Joe is going to hit that wall tomorrow," de Frere said of the current 4GB limit. "We think (4GB) will come sooner than people think."

The ClawHammer will be able to run current 32-bit software, as well as new 64-bit applications, switching between them on the fly. Such an approach extends the X86 architecture, the basis of both Intel and AMD processors.

Speed bumps
The ClawHammer will also offer clock speeds of 2GHz or faster, along with performance enhancements such as a built-in memory controller. This will give the chip a 20 to 25 percent performance gain over the current Athlon XP, Crank said.

Whether customers will buy into 64-bit PCs will be hotly debated in coming months, but AMD believes now is the time to lay the groundwork.

"Sixty-four bits helps. It's an added capability for the processor and there's a bit of future proofing...as 64-bit OSes and applications can run on the chip later," said Dean McCarron, analyst with Mercury Research. "Sixty-four-bit plus performance equals a more compelling product. The more compelling it is, the better the pricing."

AMD needs another hit product to continue the successes of its Athlon XP.

Athlon XP helped AMD boost its unit sales and average selling prices, for a while. But a second-quarter slowdown in retail PC sales hurt the company, analysts say. The new chip could provide a similar boost for the company and allow it to counter the rapid rise in clock speed of rival Intel's Pentium 4, which will hit 3GHz by the end of the year.

Industry watchers say that consumers will more likely adopt the ClawHammer for the performance bump it offers over current Athlon XP rather than for its 64-bit capabilities. In other words, they will buy it to use as a 32-bit chip.

AMD may not be able to determine if the move to 64 bits is the right one for years, until it moves on to an entirely new generation of chips after the ClawHammer. But the chipmaker steadfastly asserts that certain segments of the PC market will adopt ClawHammer just because it is a 64-bit chip. And, the company predicts, they will do so almost immediately.

Price pressure
Not everyone agrees with AMD. Market researcher Dataquest has a more conservative outlook on PC memory trends, related to price pressure.

Dataquest predicts that average PCs will contain just 1GB of memory in 2005, with high-end PCs shipping with 2GB or 2.5GB. PCs with 4GB will be available by then but will be rare, said Andrew Norwood, an analyst with Dataquest.

"We're going to go into a DRAM shortage at the end of this year," he said. "A lack of reduction in prices over the next 18 months will hold back the DRAM content in PCs."

Despite these challenges, work related to the ClawHammer progresses.

Microsoft is working on a new version of Windows that will offer 64-bit support for desktop PCs and servers. And several other companies are creating 64-bit software expected to ship next year.

At the same time, swaying PC makers may be just as important as working with Microsoft or educating consumers about the benefits of 64 bits.

Design teams at PC manufacturers will need to begin addressing 4GB memory barrier fairly soon, analysts say. They will have to choose whether to move to 64-bit chips or use chips tweaked in other ways to address more than 4GB of memory.

Despite the behind-the-scenes work and the hype, the ClawHammer's success will likely come as much from consumers' old habits as it does from cool new games and other applications.

"Look at consumer processor purchases," McCarron said. Consumers "see the bigger number and they go for it."

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

To find all articles tagged or indexed using tech_index

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I thought the clawhammer would start limited shipping this year.
Glad I didn't wait on it!

[RightWhale]

Play a snazzy game and cook dinner at the same time, all inside your PC.

Games are the driving force behind processor chip development. GIS, AutoCAD, graphics over the Internet [yeah, THAT kind ], and military apps are merely going along for the ride.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I say just keep it coming!

Someone will figure out a good reason why you just gotta have it. Doesn't everyone have a 100k square matrix they need to calculate the jacobian for?

I think I got that right!

[fourdeuce82d]

Games are the driving force behind processor chip development. GIS, AutoCAD, graphics over the Internet [yeah, THAT kind]

Jus' doin' mah part to keep the industry moving forward... *grin*

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This is part of Operation Rolling Thunder, AMD's campaign to introduce the chip,

I like that name, gives me an image that this is just for openers!

I think Intel has some real competition now!

[zeugma]

4GB+ of ram for home PCs? Methinks that might be a little bit excessive for most folks. Then again, maybe not. If you're doing video editing, 4gb would be a working minimum unless you don't mind letting your splices run all night long.

I'm kinda looking forward to the 64-bit systems to come down in price a bit. Linux runs well on it, so at least I won't have to go through a major software upgrade binge.

[zeromus]

AMD may not be able to determine if the move to 64 bits is the right one for years, until it moves on to an entirely new generation of chips after the ClawHammer. But the chipmaker steadfastly asserts that certain segments of the PC market will adopt ClawHammer just because it is a 64-bit chip. And, the company predicts, they will do so almost immediately.

They know their market...

[ArrogantBustard]

The US Air Force once ran an operation called "Rolling Thunder" which looked sort of like this:

[Billy_bob_bob]

I'd love to see Apple embrace the Clawhammer processor, and tell Motorola to take a hike. I'm tired of Moto taking forever and a day to get their speeds up, whereas AMD seems to have the best new processor out there. Could you imagine a Clawhammer based Apple machine running OS X? Now put in a decent bus architecture and loads of really fast ram and we've got something quite nice indeed.

I'm tired of having to justify Apple machines slower clock speeds and slower performance compared to the latest and greatest PC's. I want to see a flagship Apple machine that not only beats the fastest PC's but that truly humbles them, running video editing programs or Photoshop twice as fast or faster. In short, I want to see Apple get into the habit of designing and selling the biggest and baddest machines on the market.

[Dead Corpse]

Above and beyond the 64-bit aspects, AMD's chips will still run legacy code. IA-64 will only run 64-bit apps and OS. Hammer can run either, or both with no need to port all of your apps. Beyond even that, as if all that wasn't enough, AGP 8X and twice the bandwidth between the memory and the core. Edges out RAMBUS by 2Gb/sec.

[SauronOfMordor]

One of the crucial benefits of 64-bit chips is that they can manage more than 4GB of memory. But top-of-the-line PCs have only just recently topped 1GB, and few industry watchers believe consumers will need more than 4GB of memory in their systems for at least a few years.

They completely ignore what power users and developers might need on their workstations, not to mention what a server might need. Running an Apache web server, Cold Fusion, plus Dreamweaver development tools really beat up my poor little 256 Meg machine. I'm going to need to expand to 1Gig soon.

[Dead Corpse]

Wait on the K8. Tera-bytes of memory addressing. Check AMD's website for a white paper on Hypertransport and PCI-X.

[Sloth]

AMD looks like bargain right now at less than 8 bucks a share.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Few takes on this

1. MS announced yesterday that they want to hire 5000 more people for R&D. I may be wrong, but I could imagine some of those people might find themselves doing 64 bit development, both OS and apps.

2. The market's demand for more "bits" is inexorable. Last time I saw the market "demands" about 1 bit every 18 months or so. This is more or less a statement of the size of the address space of commonly run programs. There is no doubt that we are going to pass 32 bits soon, the only question is when.

3. Obviously the early adopters will be, well, early adopters, so not every soccer mom surfing the web is going to need 64 bits. But there will always be a leading, bleeding edge that will want this kind of performance and they will drag the rest of the folks along with them.

4. Ultimately, this could be the shot in the arm the industry will need. For the last 2 or 3 years, there has been no compelling reason to upgrade. In the next 5 or so years, there clearly will be, as we go to 64 bit CPUs, OSs and apps. Progress marches on, there will be people who complain about being "forced" to junk their 32 bit stuff but it's gonna happen, like it or not.

[Mr170IQ]

I'm going to need to expand to 1Gig soon

The time is ripe. PC133 is at an all-time low - $41 for 512MB including shipping from pricewatch. Pretty darn sweet, if you ask me.

[Dead Corpse]

It could be sooner than that. AMD has much better software development tools for porting to 64-bit than Intel.

What'd take you two months to recode for IA-64, you could do inside a week with Hammer.

[aSkeptic]

AMD at the moment, has stunning advantages over its competitor, Intel. It isn't a matter of when consumers "need" 64 bit computing, its a matter of it being sellable. Itanium has serious disadvantages (currently) compared to the hammer. Very serious. Lets look at the items that really matter:

production! Itanium has a large die size and requires large L2 and L3 caches. You may hear about shrinking die sizes. The reason this is important is that the smaller the die, the more chips you can produce. Itanium was explained to have a 500mm2 sized die... Nearly 4 times the size of the athlon. It also needs more external chips for the riser card (not that again!!)

Backwards compatible in hardware! Though this is still being debated, currently Itanium to x86 emulation is very slow, at once thought to be roughly equivilant to the performance of a 90mhz pentiumI. This is the true reason intel doesn't think the desktop market isn't ready for 64bit computing. They are just deluding themselves. customers have trillions of dollers invested in x86 software. The entire software market!!! except of course, apple...

The athlon IS compatible to x86 in hardware! And it performs about the same as current generation Athlons. You don't have to rewrite your software to run on the new chip to make it work, (or perform at least as well as your old athlon rig). 64bit enhanced functions can be added to existing 32bit code.

Intel then has to battle 2 fronts. If this was a game of Go, and I was white (and in a position like this early in the game) I would be dreading a long_boring_ass_whoopin. Intel has to compete in 2 markets! It is now Pentium and Itanium verses just Athlon64 (or whatever it will be called). Itanium might have a few advantages for floating point performance, but for integer its not so hot. Most business apps and games require lots of int, not FP.

I predict that intel will sustain a slight advantage over athlon64 for 32bit apps, but only for about 9 months. But they wont ever have hope to a price advantage over AMD because AMD can focus on just athlon64 chip making and not Athlon32 and Athlon64.

Athlon64 would really dominate the workstation market. I consider a workstation to be of the windows2000 world. This only leaves me to x86 hardware. What if some of my highend 3d programs offer a couple enhancements that bring me 2 or 4 as much performance? OO0ooo0OO

This might sound like the FUD of all FUD against Intel. But these are the facts as I know them. Intel is going to get shredded.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Maybe you can help explain the significance of some of the announcements coming out..

First some general links for anyone interested:

AMD 8thgenerationnews

AMD Athlon™ XP Processor Combined With Nvidia® Nforce2 Platform Processors To Provide Outstanding System Performance

AMD Athlon™ XP Processor Combined With Nvidia® Nforce2 Platform Processors To Provide Outstanding System Performance

-Systems based on AMD Athlon and AMD Duron™ processor family products and NVIDIA nForce2 Platform Processors expected to offer increased memory bandwidth and connectivity, and exceptional graphics performance-

SUNNYVALE, CA -- July 16, 2002 --AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced support for NVIDIA® nForce2 - NVIDIA’s upcoming family of highly integrated core-logic platform processors. NVIDIA nForce2 Platform Processors will be optimized for systems with AMD Athlon™ XP and AMD Duron™ processors.

Enterprise and individual customers can expect to benefit from an AMD and NVIDIA nForce2 platform. High-speed PC3200 DDR memory will provide enterprise customers optimized execution of multi-threaded, mission-critical applications, and the 128-bit architecture can reduce memory latency enabling faster system and content creation performance. Individual users can expect to realize exceptional audio and gaming performance with real-time audio encoding of up to 256 simultaneous audio streams, and outstanding graphics and streaming audio and video with NVIDIA StreamThru™ technology featuring HyperTransport™ technology.

“The exceptional performance achieved by coupling the latest AMD Athlon and AMD Duron processor technologies with the upcoming NVIDIA nForce2 Platform Processors is continued proof that significant performance breakthroughs can be achieved using open, industry standards,” said Rich Heye, vice president platform engineering and infrastructure, Computation Products Group, AMD. “With support for both AGP-8X and HyperTransport technology, the AMD and NVIDIA platform will deliver fast and efficient processing power and overall system performance.”

“AMD processors provide the best complement to our new highly integrated nForce2 Platform Processors,” said Drew Henry, senior director of platform product management at NVIDIA. “We have worked closely with AMD to fine-tune our engineering designs to ensure that nForce2 Platform Processors take full advantage of the architectural innovations of AMD’s desktop processors.”

Demonstrations of systems based on AMD and NVIDIA nForce2 Platform Processors will be available from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Platform Conference, being held today and tomorrow at the Silicon Valley Conference Center in San Jose, CA.

About HyperTransport™ Technology
HyperTransport technology is a high-speed, high-performance, point-to-point link for integrated circuits, and is designed to meet the bandwidth needs of tomorrow’s computing and communications platforms. HyperTransport technology helps reduce the number of buses while providing a high-performance link for PCs, workstations, and servers, as well as numerous embedded applications and highly scalable multiprocessing systems. It is designed to allow chips inside of PCs, networking and communications devices to communicate with each other up to 48 times faster than with some existing bus technologies.

About AMD
AMD is a global supplier of integrated circuits for the personal and networked computer and communications markets with manufacturing facilities in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Asia. AMD, a Fortune 500 and Standard & Poor’s 500 company, produces microprocessors, Flash memory devices, and support circuitry for communications and networking applications. Founded in 1969 and based in Sunnyvale, California, AMD had revenues of $3.9 billion in 2001. (NYSE: AMD).

AMD on the Web
For more information about today’s announcement, please visit www.amd.com/8thgenerationnews. Additional press releases are available at www.amd.com/news/news.html.

AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Athlon, AMD Duron, and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. HyperTransport is a trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. Other product names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

2**32 = 4*10**9 = 4 GB

2**64 = 4 billion times 4GB

You'd think that would last forever. But then, if memory doubles every 18 months, forever will turn out to be exactly

32*1.5 = 48 years.

Close enough, for my purposes . . .