Intel eyes 64-bit & now XP 64 for AMD, free (1 year)! plus Dell commets on 64 bit...

[cm123]

Intel President and Chief Operating Officer Paul Otellini on Wednesday said the world's largest chipmaker would likely give its 32-bit microprocessors an upgrade to 64 bits once supporting software becomes available.


Otellini's comments represented Intel's strongest endorsement yet of a technological advance first introduced by rival Advanced Micro Devices, said Nathan Brookwood, a technology analyst with Insight 64.

Click here for the whole story

 

[cm123]

and another comment here now too:

http://www.anandtech.com/#21408


Do you all think Intel will have a better product than AMD since they are slow to release? or just a late product so as to say me too?

 

[Ronin]

Considering intel already tried it with the Itanium and failed miserably, I'd say the experience taught them very little. I've also heard that these 64 bit extensions are going to be available via a snap-on onto your current 32bit CPU (ala Overdrive upgrade back in the day). If that's the case, I'm gonna be laughing over and over as I happily use my A64's

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: RoninCS
Considering intel already tried it with the Itanium and failed miserably, I'd say the experience taught them very little. I've also heard that these 64 bit extensions are going to be available via a snap-on onto your current 32bit CPU (ala Overdrive upgrade back in the day). If that's the case, I'm gonna be laughing over and over as I happily use my A64's

Itanium hasn't really "failed", AFAIK it has done reasonably well in the Market it was intended to compete in. Any aspirations that it would become mainstream is likely dead though.

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: sandorski

Originally posted by: RoninCS
Considering intel already tried it with the Itanium and failed miserably, I'd say the experience taught them very little. I've also heard that these 64 bit extensions are going to be available via a snap-on onto your current 32bit CPU (ala Overdrive upgrade back in the day). If that's the case, I'm gonna be laughing over and over as I happily use my A64's

Itanium hasn't really "failed", AFAIK it has done reasonably well in the Market it was intended to compete in. Any aspirations that it would become mainstream is likely dead though.

i don't see how itanium would be tagged a failure either, and further, regardless of whether it was or wasn't, how do you know what they did or didn't learn from that endeavor?

if anything, amd has "failed" on many levels. while amd has made great strides in the enthusiast market, look at the corporate desktop, and how many of intel's crappy celeron's grace the insides of low budged workstations instead of the much better amd xp cpu's.

i think it's great amd is getting a jumpstart over intel with athlon 64, however the work isn't in the hardware, imo it's in changing the perceptions of the corporate world where much of the thinking is anything not labelled "intel" is inferior.

 

[Dman877]

My dad helps design servers for Digital/Compaq/HP using 64 bit cpu's starting with Alpha chips, then moving to Itanic somewhere in the Compaq/HP timespan. Anyway he said Itanic sucked bad compared to Alpha processors and that Intel pretty much told their customers not to expect much from itanic until the third or fourth gen was released (they are only second gen atm I think). Of course since its intel it's probably done just fine in terms of sales. My dad never even heard of AMD till I started using the procs and hasn't heard of AMD's 64 bit procs yet either. AMD desperately needs better marketing in this country.

 

[Soulkeeper]

i just want a fast 32-bit cpu for now
mmmm prescott.............

 

[JeremiahTheGreat]

Originally posted by: Soulkeeper
i just want a fast 32-bit cpu for now
mmmm prescott.............

was that "mmmm" being sarcastic? I dunno.. cause all the early benchmarks show the prescott has an average of 0% performance increase over P4... certainly nothing to be drooling about.

 

[dragonic]

nice intel; first you say that 64-bit ain't needed for years and now you say that you will switch to 64-bit

looks like Intel is scared of AMD

 

[VIAN]

if anything, amd has "failed" on many levels. while amd has made great strides in the enthusiast market, look at the corporate desktop, and how many of intel's crappy celeron's grace the insides of low budged workstations instead of the much better amd xp cpu's.

It's Dell, damn OEMs. Dell refuses to even carry one Athlon. I think AMD may need to try a new marketing strategy, maybe. I think they have a good one with there performance ratings. I loved to hear Intel say no, to AMDs proposal of switching to these performance rating numbers instead of GHz. Goodbye Celeron, hello mediocre Pentiums. Not what it once was. Intel's not stupid, they have the retards by the balls.

Not starting a flame war. IMO, both are very good chips. I just think AMD edges out.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: dragonic
nice intel; first you say that 64-bit ain't needed for years and now you say that you will switch to 64-bit

looks like Intel is scared of AMD

Every manufacturer's position on a situation like this would be, "if the market demands it, we will produce it." So Intel can keep saying they don't think 64-bit is necessary on the desktop yet, they'll produce 64-bit CPU's anyway since their PR BS about 64-bit processing being useless on the desktop has had no effect on the sales of Athlon-64's since they outperform the Pentium 4 (in it's current northwood core revision) in 32-bit processing and offer 64-bit processing as a bonus.

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Soulkeeper
i just want a fast 32-bit cpu for now
mmmm prescott.............

I think the fast 32bit Intel CPU you will want is a P4EE. I've been far less than impressed with the Prescott so far.

 

[cm123]

So now that Microsoft has the Release Cand. XP 64 for free download, does this not point to software in 64 bit is coming for Intel then? Will we now see this Intel 64 CPU Info, or just more PR?

Intel must love this timing, after these comments/Stories, plus upon the release of another 32 bit Intel CPU, free software (for 1 year) for the AMD 64.

Get your XP 64 for AMD 64 here (FREE)

Plus some Dell comments...

MDell: Well I think this idea of taking the 32-bit instruction set and extending it is good. I don't think AMD is the only company that's thought of that. In fact, I think Intel's kind of on record as talking about that. I don't think they've made a full, official announcement, but they have sort of indicated they have [it], so I think when you sort of step back and you say, what would you do with one if you had it today?I fully expect that there will be a variety of choices there, and we're going to fully participate.

Translation: We will come very late to the real 64 bit game, but we are big enough that it won't matter


http://www.amdzone.com/#2

 

[Sahakiel]

Just wanted to point out a few things :

x86 is now the only CISC ISA on the market. If not, then it's damn close. It's alos probably the only ISA left that uses a 2-operand stack-based architecture with variable length instructions. It's the ISA to hate because it incorporates just about every bad design decision possible. There's a reason both Intel and AMD went to internal RISC cores.

Intel's stance on 64-bit stems from the x86 ISA. It's basically a piece of crap. That 20 stage pipeline in Northwood and 31 stages in Prescott do not include the x86 decoding hardware. In other words, as pipelines get longer and longer, the x86 decoding will become a major hurdle. We have dedicated hardware before the instruction fetch to decode x86 into something else. In the future, that hardware may need to be moved closer to the bus interface.

Itanium uses a new architecture philosophy that's been in development for far longer than the 1994 announcement would suggest. It's sort of a hybrid VLIW/superscalar design. That's probably the main reason for it's relatively poor performance. That, and the sheer number of transistors.

Designing a new architecture for x86 is a pain in the ass. Why do you think AMD has basically stuck with Athlon technology for so many years? They don't really have the money or the personnel to come up with a new design. It's that bloody hard.

The only reason for x86's continued existence is supporting legacy software. The side effect is that software engineers continue to write new software due to market demands. It's a viscious cycle.