Linus: Praying for Hammer to Win 487
An anonymous reader writes "The boys at Intel can't be happy with the latest opposition to the IA-64 instruction set. According to this Inquirer scoop, Linus himself has weighed in, and it appears he's putting his eggs in the x86-64 basket. In the original usenet post, he goes so far as to say that 'We're ... praying that AMD's x86-64 succeeds in the market, forcing Intel to make Yamhill their standard platform.'"
what a trashy article (Score:5, Insightful)
crap story.
Not surprising... (Score:4, Insightful)
Beside that, who cares for the CPU's instruction set? Nobody, except compiler designers and very few assembler programmers. And they already know x86 and the tools exist. So the only argument for Itanium can be performance/price. And ATM it looks like Opterons will be cheaper.
Just wishing... (Score:3, Insightful)
what did the inquirer add? (Score:2, Insightful)
Mountain out of a molehill (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading the Linus's email it seems that he wasn't endorsing one way or the other. He was just hoping x86-64 became dominant since it would stave off some issues related to how pages were handled.
Apparently, if things go the Itanium route then some page related things get more complicated but that's it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
x86, why can't you just die? (Score:5, Insightful)
well, now AMD is creating the kruftiest, heaviest, nastiest instruction set of backwards-compatible crud in the history of processor-dom. Intel comes out with a new, no-legacy 64-bit instruction set, and all of a sudden it is, "god, we hope AMD wins so all our old crap still works".
well anyway, here's at least one programmer who is looking forward to getting his mitts on a 64-bit chip which doesn't have layer upon layer of backwards compatibility, wrapped in an overpowered muscle-car of silicon. you'd think we would have learned our lesson with the Alpha, a much, much better chip than the x86 but no one adopted it. people scream and bitch and moan about supporting all the ancient krufty x86 bloat, but when it comes time, they stick with what is comfortable.
more than likely, Intel's 64-bit offering will follow the road of Alpha into technical superiority and market disaster. and we'll be stuck still supporting 286 instructions. way to go.
Re:Momentum (Score:5, Insightful)
What endorsement is that? AMD has been utterly piggish with respect to open source. GCC still produces awful optimizations when targeting any AMD chip, and in fact has gotten worse between 2.9x and 3.x. Intel started out contributing pgcc when Linux was still in its infancy, and code output for Pentiums has gotten successively better. When bad optimization can halve your effective computation rate, that I think speaks volumes.
That said, I have to agree with Linus on this one. Itanium would be a disaster for free compilers, as heavily encumbered as it is by compiler technology patents. And when it comes down to it, I'm not all that certain I want my general purpose language compiler generating what is effectively microcode anyway.
IMHO of course.
Re:This is a bit ironic.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that it's quite likely that an Opteron will be faster than an Itanium for most real-world tasks. At the very least it looks like it will be comparable in speed, and cheaper. If the Itanium really was screamingly fast, that would be different.
Re:This is FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
We're a lot more likely to make PAGE_SIZE bigger, and generally praying that AMD's x86-64 succeeds in the market, forcing Intel to make Yamhill their standard platform. At which point we _could_ make things truly 64 bits
He wants hammer to succeed only so Intel will have to go 64 bit and they can go all out 64 bit, this is not Linus picking the AMD camp.
usernet post here [google.com]
Re:nice (Score:2, Insightful)
>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, Apple's hardware sucks. Most macs have a slow processor talking over a slow bus to slow RAM. Most of them also have slow graphics, using GeForce-4 MXs where comparable (pecking order not price) PCs would use GeForce 4 4200s. Apples integration and build quality might be great, but not its hardware.
Re:Just wishing... (Score:3, Insightful)
As would anyone else who has had to get 32 bit x86 to handle more than 4 gig of ram or tried and figgure out how to juggle the few registers provicded as efficiantly as possible.
I for one am also wishing for cheap 64 bit.
And what Sir Linus says is gospel truth is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel's got a sound solution and they at least have the balls to finally give the cruddy old x86 architecture the heave-ho; ok they can't do it now but IA64's architecture does not require 8086 or IA32 to bootstrap it so both can be thrown out sooner or later. Regardless of what the actual metal might be, the actual platform is beautifully elegant next to x86 and will ultimately be a real asset in the future as 64 bit architectures become the norm, much more so than some short term gain that might be had by virtue of a superior implementation from AMD.
Maybe I'm missing something here (OK I'm not on the design teams for both processors so I certainly AM missing something here) but from this standpoint, it looks like this would be the one time when I want to cheer for Intel as opposed to AMD. Pity they had to botch the development cycle like they did. *sigh*
completely misunderstood: out of context (Score:4, Insightful)
Now Intel of course just reckons that people should buy Itaniums if they want this (and apparently they did actually ship 250 of the Itanium 1...) but someone is buying these. Even though you have to use 32 processes in order to use the memory.
Clearly these machines should be 64 bit, thats what Linus was commenting on. Then we could leave at least some of the limits for 32 bit machines without complaints.
The other problem is non-atomic 64 bit ops on 32 bit machines, incrementing counters and such. This has caused quite a few problems recently.
32 bit CPUs are here forever (Score:5, Insightful)
If linux is to be used in such devices, it'll have to support 32bit architectures.
PS, PPC chips are 32bits. IBM Power chips are 64bits but they are actually different from PPC chips. Code written for one doesn't run on the other - something the Mac rumor mongers simply don't understand with their "Apple is going to use a IBM Power CPU" bs.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:4, Insightful)
A bit ironic, that remark. That's basically what the AMD guys decided when they went for X86-64: that the instruction set really didn't matter, and that it was implementation and good ole' Moore's Law that really counted. Meanwhile, when the instruction set doesn't matter, you've got Intel spending a cool $10 bill on theirs. So, I have to say, I find your remark quite amusing.
C//
Re:And what Sir Linus says is gospel truth is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
> piece of shit.
You obviously don't know anything about it. In 64-bit mode Hammer gives you 16 general purpose registers (RAX,
> the actual platform is beautifully elegant
Unfortunately you can't run programs on the "actual platform". You can only run programs on the slow and expensive Itanium and Itanium 2.
Out of context (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't take this particular quote to be his definitive statement of preference for x86-64 over IA-64.
Re: The PPC eBook spec supports 32 and 64 bit CPUs (Score:4, Insightful)
The is absolutely no reason to go with a 64bit CPU unless you have to do a lot of work with 64bit integers (unlikely) or you need greater then 4gigs of memory space (more likely). The eBook spec supports future CPUs for Macintosh computers that require lots of RAM (64bit) and future CPUs for the embedded market that require very little memory (32bit). Those CPUs that are currently available are 32bit CPUs.
And yes, there was the failed PPC 620 CPU but that never really made it out into any products so there haven't been any real 64bit PPC CPUs to date (although I'm sure they're coming.)
As far as Power chips running PPC code - I don't think so, although I could be wrong. From what I understand, the PPC601 was a transition chip to the PPC architecture. It was designed by IBM and able to run much of the Power instruction set - thus making Power applications easy to port. Then came the 603 and 604 CPUs designed by Motorola. They were much different from the original 601. This is all when IBM had great plans of the PPC architecture being able to do everything and taking over 8x86 - it didn't happen. From there, the architectures diverged with PPC going towards efficiency and Power going for, well, power.
To make a long story short, PPC can _almost_ run the Power instruction set of 1990 - or at least code is easy to port. However, the Power architecture was never designed to run the PPC instruction set. A Power CPU of today won't run a program compiled for PPC.
General misunderstanding on IPF (IA64) pureness. (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, it's anything but pure. It also has an IA32 (i386) compatibility mode, that kills any die size benefits of a new architecture, at least for the next few generations until IA32 really dies.
Third, even when it gets rid of IA32 compatibility, IPF may still be a pig: many people who know more about this issue than me consider it to be too complex and full of bad trade-offs, essentially stretching a good idea (VLIW) too far (EPIC).
There is the argument that RISC architectures are essentially better. Too bad IBM can't find its way to the general market, Motorola has only proprietary Apples as its venue, Sun falters in execution and forfeited popularisation, and Digital was killed by elitism.
What Linus says is not as important... (Score:3, Insightful)
What Linus says is not as important as the fact that his words are spread and discussed all over the internet. That's proof that we don't have a one- or two-player game any longer (Microsoft plus Intel).
It's an important power-shift, which took place. Now four players decide the further development: two OS- and two CPU- manufacturers. And to avoid deadly risks they need to be compatible to each other.
Woopy! The market is getting back it's power!
Are X86-64 and IA-64 really competitors? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Clarification (Score:3, Insightful)
-B
Wants Hammer to beat Pentium, not Itanium (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what a trashy article (Score:4, Insightful)
Carmack posts something here, you get instant linkage and stories out on most gaming sites pointing to that post.
Gates says something, everybody jumps on his speech and tries to analyse everything up to the point of what he had for breakfast, and his intentions for the next 20 years.
Jobs farts, mac users are all exited, etc etc..
The idea here is some people follow this stuff religiously, while for you it might be pointless for some others they really dig that stuff. Tabloid are way more crappy and unreliable than this story, and the worst? They sell like hotcakes.
To give you an example, I've found slashdot by a linkage of an amiga story. While I am not a Linux freak or "your rights online" active militant, I do have my own "tabloid" stories that I like to follow (like amiga stuff for example).
I've had the same reaction when I saw the article ("my, talk about far-fetched") but when you go and read the usenet post, it can make you think. If you don't care about linux and/or processors/os, well, you skip the story and move to the next, if you do like the hardware/OS scene, it makes a nice read, to get back to my idea, it tells you that if Linus wants the x86-64 to win, maybe they are designing the transmetta's next gen on that instruction set?, maybe this maybe that. Nevertheless, for people who like that kind of stories, it's a bit above the tabloid I'd say, because it's not a quote out of context and it's authentic.
my 0.02c.