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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Paul Engel who wrote (82693)12/11/1999 8:43:00 PM
From: Dan3  Read Replies (3) of 1571600
 
Re: when SLUDGEHummer appears, AMD will have a NEGATIVE 18 month "lead"

Paul,

Many of the possible benefits of larger word and address sizes were achieved in the move from 8 to 16 bits (essentially unlimited number of instructions and modes). Moving to 32 bits allowed for the use of flat memory spaces for all but a handful of systems. Moving to 64 bits allows for very large virtual memory sizes and more data to be moved in a single clock by a single instruction. Very large virtual memory sizes are needed primarily by terabyte sized databases - even 5 years from now, this will matter to fewer than 1% of systems. The other benefit, making extended (64bit) move, load, etc. instructions available to the compiler should not be too hard to implement.

Many of the postulated benefits of the Itanium are due not to any inherent advantage of going from 32 to 64 bits, (unlike the moves from 8 to 16 to 32 bits) but from having the CPU execute several 8 to 32 bit operations in parrallel which is the VLIW paradigm or a sort of generalized 3DNow/SSE instruction set. It is providing a compiler that can parrallelize instructions in this way that has occupied Intel for many years as a compiler was developed to take advantage of the planned architecture of the Itanium.

What I find intriguing is that Sledgehammer may come out from the start with two cores per chip. 64 bits should handle any address requirements for a long time, and if instructions are provided to synchronize the cores to allow for 128 moves, loads, etc. AMD could be shipping a 128bit processor a few months after Intel ships its 64 bit processor. The dual cores would let the chip take advantage of years of development of multithreaded operating systems and compilers without so much as a re-compile. The synch instructions would let it move data at twice the per/clock rate of Itanium.

My understanding from early published reports is that Itanium is pretty large and uses a lot of power - it may be several more years before it will be practical to put multiple Itanium cores on a single die. So AMD could be the sole provider of 128 bit chips for quite a while. Maybe 4 willamettes on a core? Oops, only 32 bit addressing, too bad. Two Mckinleys on a die? How long till that can ship?

Cheers,

Dan
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