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]

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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 . . .