Dan, Re: ". Unlike Itanic/Mckinley, Hammer doesn't need special support. That's the genius of AMD's strategy and the achilles heel of Intel's strategy."
First of all, you're wrong. x86-64 requires OS support, and application support to make use of the 64-bit processing. What it doesn't require is reinventing the wheel when it comes to compilers and infrastructure, but much of that work has already been done for IA-64. For the past 8 years or more, research has been done on finding the best ways to get the most performance out of EPIC. While there is much work left to be done, the major milestones have already been crossed. IA-64 already has the support, while AMD won't have a major OS ready for launch, and very few applications, except the occasional open-source project to run on x86-64.
The other thing is that 64-bit performance may not be all it's cracked up to be. So far the only difference seems to be the obvious 64-bit data processing, and the added registers. Other than that, there isn't much to offer above x86. There is nothing to suggest that they will get any more performance than 32-bit mode can offer. Why then should any developer even bother to support x86-64 in their applications? Why then would any business seriously consider it a viable 64-bit alternative?
You "just don't get it", Dan. Hammer is a joke, and it will only end up being AMD's next 32-bit desktop processor.
wanna_bmw |
