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

[supercat]

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.

Hasn't every processor since the 486, other than the 486sx, included eight 80-bit registers which can be loaded/stored in 32- or 64-bit chunks as needed?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Interesting question?

I don't know the machine architectures at all!

[applemac_g4]

"Athlon64 would really dominate the workstation market."

Thought: what would this do to Sun?

[applemac_g4]

"Sounds like they are building a bettermouse trap to me, I will be drooling over this one !"

8 months ago, I bought an AMD based computer - a dual 1.9ghz Athlon tower. It's unbelievable! You never wait for anything...and it doesn't matter if you're loading 1 web page, or a half dozen simultaneously.

Personally, I can't think of any reason to get an Intel based machine unless you are building a computer for the sole purpose of playing 3d shooter video games.

[aSkeptic]

not really sure. I don't really understand sun's market. Seems to be in an echelon above what I'm used to. But I've never been impressed by their workstation specs. Especially for the $$$. They will have an advantage in very large SMP systems (64 processors) for a long time...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

8 months ago, I bought an AMD based computer - a dual 1.9ghz Athlon tower. It's unbelievable! You never wait for anything...and it doesn't matter if you're loading 1 web page, or a half dozen simultaneously.

Your system really sounds like a screamer.

I almost spent the bucks to buy one , but wasn't happy with some details.

So I bought a very nice coolermaster case with a removable motherboard tray and had lots of fun picking and choosing and checking for cooling solutions ,etc.

I now have a 2000+ Athlon system with an 18 gbyte 10k rpm SCSI HDD to hold the Operating System and a WD 120 Gigabyte HDD to hold Data.

Being an old MainFrame guy, I believe you need a good DASD system to get performance.
Haven't got it onto the internet as yet, still checking things, loading software , etc.
I decided to go cheaper and wait for the HAMMER!!.

Since I am currently running a 300 MHZ 256 MByte system I think things will speed up considerably!