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Red Hat Software Businesses AMD

Red Hat Releases x86_64 Technology Preview, GinGin 141

Posted by Hemos from the trying-it-out-the-new-stuff dept.
HTMLSpinnr writes "Red Hat announced today it's release of GinGin64, a "Technology Preview" (read: not beta) of Red Hat's AMD64 technology. You can grab a copy here or at one of Red Hat's various mirrors. Though the version number listed in the release notes is 8.0.95, inside sources say it's based on Red Hat 9 plus some updates."
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Red Hat Releases x86_64 Technology Preview, GinGin More

Red Hat Releases x86_64 Technology Preview, GinGin

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  • Great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CausticWindow ( 632215 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @06:34AM (#5860884)
    Anybody know about any (realatively new) versions of Linux for Itanium that one could benchmark this against? Preferably free of charge?

    • Re:Great (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just get gentoo and install it on both pc's, benchmark, done. These are really nothing but recompiles.
      • Ok, so the standard version of gcc can compile for both Itanium and x86-64? I'll try that then (when I can borrow some x86-64 hw too).

        • recompile (Score:4, Interesting)

          by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @07:23AM (#5861071) Homepage Journal
          But how good would a recompile for Itanium with gcc really be? I've been under the impression that the only really decent compiler for IA64 came from Intel/HP. It's a tough target to compile for.

    • Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @07:28AM (#5861087) Homepage
      How are you going to benchmark it?

      The only meaningful benchmark IMO is processing_power/cost. A comparison based on clock speed would be pretty useless since architectures are different, and Itanium is so incredibly expensive. I'm pretty sure that even if x86_64 is slower it's much cheaper to get enough CPUs for your needs than to buy an Itanium.
      • The only meaningful benchmark IMO is processing_power/cost.

        So, you would be happy buying only eMachines to put in your server room ? :)

        • Re:Great (Score:2, Insightful)

          by vadim_t ( 324782 )
          No, I meant that the only meaningful way of comparing processors is provided power for the same amount of money. If I need a server can can handle X load, and I can either get a dual AMD machine for $3000, or a single CPU Itanium for $6800 [ibuyernet.com], then the AMD one clearly wins, even if the CPU can do less work per second than the Itanium.

          Now, I didn't research this much, but my point is that all that matters is the cost of doing X task with AMD processors vs Intel ones. Clock speed is irrelevant when comparing co
      • ...Itanium is so incredibly expensive.

        It is, because it was originally designed to compete with old "big iron" RISC servers. Itanium is big, it is hot, it is low-volume, and it is expensive.

        I would bet that Opteron actually has Intel shitting itself right now. The more I see about Opteron, the better it looks for 1 to 4 CPU servers, which are generally powerful enough for most tasks, now-a-days. Opteron is sitting squarely in competition with Xeon, Itanium, PowerPC, UltraSPARC, MIPS, etc. for a huge s
      • The only meaningful benchmark IMO is processing_power/cost. A comparison based on clock speed would be pretty useless since architectures are different, and Itanium is so incredibly expensive.

        There are two meaningful quantities. Performance, and price/performance. A performance metric, like SPEC, measures (primarily) the absolute performance of the CPU, by measuring the time taken to complete a given computational task. This might be computing a quantum dynamics problem, or calculating a satellite traject

        • Re:Great (Score:2, Interesting)

          by vadim_t ( 324782 )
          Well, unless your budget is unlimited, or whatever you're working on is not paralellizable, price/performance is still more important than the performance of an individual CPU. I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll have to switch to using multiple CPUs anyway.
          • Well, unless your budget is unlimited, or whatever you're working on is not paralellizable, price/performance is still more important than the performance of an individual CPU. I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll have to switch to using multiple CPUs anyway.

            Massively parallel supercomputers are being built using both Itanic, er, Itanium and Opteron processors. Compute performance and memory addressing capability per node are still important. Probably more important in those applications than absolute pe

            • Ah, but if you've got to do something that requires a supercomputer then you have to look at the whole instead of just the CPU. For a consumer it makes sense to replace a 1Ghz CPU with a 2 Ghz one and see games work two times faster. But if you are processing GBs of data and accessing memory very randomly then it might not help much if your CPU spends most of the time waiting for the RAM.

              In these cases you'd have to consider everything, for example, which CPU is better suited to the task, up to how many CP
          • Absolute performance might be important if you use software that charges exorbitant per-CPU licensing fees. I know several packages that cost $5k-$15k per CPU - in that case, the cost of the CPU itself is negligible, so you might as well go for the highest absolute performance.

            Large datacenters also probably need to worry about performance/power consumed, and performance/heat output.
      • As I said before, prices are changing fast, so it is a little tricky to find the price.
        But you certinly have a point here.
        I'd say: find the time to complete your task for a number of computer modells FIRST.
        Then it would be quite easy to find prices when you are about to place an order for 200 machines.

        Gaming benchmarks is a totaly different thing. What difference does 145 fps do compared to 144 fps when your screen only updates 90 times per second?

    • ROTFL (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Fefe ( 6964 )
      Yeah, right, like you log in to a public free Itanic server to run some benchmark and expect to be a) the only user of that machine and b) that nobody logs in and skews your numbers while the benchmark runs.

      Besides, Itanic is a horrible performer in day to day tasks. I compiled my libc project [www.fefe.de] on a 900 MHz Itanic II and it was outperformed by a factor of four by my 900 MHz Pentium 2 notebook.

      I'm talking about the compilation speed here. Transcoding MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 is also a lot slower, a German univers

      • Who said anything about logging into a public Itanium server? I've got one in the office next to mine.

      • Although I'm definitely not going to question your basic statement of the Itanium being a terrible performer in "day-to-day tasks", compilation is probably a VERY unfair thing to use for benchmarking. Remember that one of the big problems with the EPIC architecture is that the compiler has all responsibility for optimizing the binary code in such a way that the maximum number of instructions can be exectuted in parallel. The process of compilation and optimization is hence probably massively more difficult

  • MMmm.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Friday May 02, 2003 @06:34AM (#5860886) Homepage Journal

    GinGin and TonicTonic with a good squeeze of LimeLime.

  • Is it worth it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AlistairGroves ( 546420 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @06:36AM (#5860891)
    So how big are the performance gains? And does this make it worth holding out for the Athlon 64 proccessors?

    • Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @06:51AM (#5860949)
      64bit is not primarily about raw processor speed, it's about being able to address more than 4G of memory. But, FWIW, the AMD chips seem to be a bit faster than the current crop of 32bit chips as well.

      • Re:Is it worth it? (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        ...plus the marketing value. A pointy haired boss drool for buzzwords, if it ain't "64-bit" it's not interesting. Trust me, it's like this IRL. Running a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit arch sounds "half efficient" for the PHB.

        -smurk

      • Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Informative)

        by ShonFerg ( 652824 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @09:36AM (#5861815)

        Actually, the biggest speed boost from operating in 64-bit mode comes from the fact that Opteron/Athlon 64 has twice the general purpose and SSE registers, and also is the first AMD processor to support SSE2. The low register count has always been a stumbling point for x86 processors compared to other technologies like the PowerPC, which have many, many more. This is the fastest and most vital memory to any processor so adding more was an awesome decision, but of course they only work in 64-bit mode.

        The fact that it's 64-bit will only help you (double the speed, actually) if you're operating on 64-bit variables, which don't come up in general software very much, but are very good for scientific research, simulations, etc.

        And yes, you can directly address more than 4GB of memory... in fact each processor has it's own memory controller built in which also adds to the speed a bit and means that in multi-processor systems each processor gets its own bank of DIMMs.

        There's a wonderful article over at ArsTechnica which does a great job of explaining all the benefits of the x86-64 technology here. [arstechnica.com]

        --Shon

        • 64-bit ops can be more than twice as fast as 32-bit ops on 64-bit data. Consider multiplication, where you need to do four pairwise multiplies plus some adds. Or "neg", which is one instruction for 32-bit data, but three instructions for 64-bit data on a 32-bit machine. (neg low, adc high, neg high)

        • The fact that it's 64-bit will only help you (double the speed, actually) if you're operating on 64-bit variables, which don't come up in general software very much, but are very good for scientific research, simulations, etc.

          This is a common argument, and I get to see it all the time. I.e., that 64-bit calculations are not going to benefit a lot of people, because not many people are using them right now. On the other hand, people aren't using them now because they can be painfully slow on their 32-bit

          • Fixed point 64-bit math is something I hadn't considered, but you're right, that might be an alternative to using floating point.

            Still, using SSE2 would probably be a better alternative for applications like DVD burning which require repetative instructions since you can process packages of 128-bit data all at once. That way you could instruct the processor to take in 4 32-bit floating point numbers (or 2 64-bit ones) at one time and do operations on them them in parallel rather than process one 64-bit fi
        • The fact that it's 64-bit will only help you (double the speed, actually) if you're operating on 64-bit variables, which don't come up in general software very much, but are very good for scientific research, simulations, etc.

          No, that's just not true. "64 bit" these days only tells you something about the size of a pointer but not much more. Beyond that, 16 bit, 32 bit, and 64 bit processors have a wide variety of operations, ALUs, and bus widths. There are "32 bit processors" with 16 bit data buses, "

          • No, that's just not true. "64 bit" these days only tells you something about the size of a pointer but not much more.

            We're talking about x86-64 right? It has the capability to operate on 64-bit integer data, and use 64-bit pointers, and retains x87's existing ability to operate on 64-bit floating point numbers with 80-bit internal accuracy, while gaining SSE2's ability to operate on 128-bit vectors.

            It is very unlikely that on a well-defined 64 bit processors, half the processor remains idle when

      • Breaking the 4G of memory does come at a cost, though. If your code uses a whole lot of pointers (many CAD & EDA packages do), then because the pointers take up twice the space they used to, you'll need up to 8G of physical memory to do the same task you could do with 4G on a 32-bit system. And twice the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth, too. It's a pretty steep cost!
        • Breaking the 4G of memory does come at a cost, though. If your code uses a whole lot of pointers (many CAD & EDA packages do), then because the pointers take up twice the space they used to, you'll need up to 8G of physical memory to do the same task you could do with 4G on a 32-bit system. And twice the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth, too. It's a pretty steep cost!

          That may be true for your average, poorly written desktop software, but it is false for well-written scientific or engineering soft

          • Bingo ;) Sorry; I should have pointed out this flip side. I kept quiet becuase it's something our small company can use to competitive advantage. We have a neat code generator and a good code methodogy that lets us support many different memory models with literally a click of a button. Other companies without this might get trapped behind a lot of legacy code.

  • Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @06:49AM (#5860940)
    How is the Debian support for the 64bit AMD chips coming along?

    • Re:Debian? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hold on there buddy you're talking new technology + debian better wait about a decade.

    • Re:Debian? (Score:3, Funny)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
      It's going great! Their plan for x86-64 support is coming along nicely:
      1. Wait for RedHat to implement x86-64 support.
      2. ?
      3. Profit!

      Of course, this is how it's done, this is what's so nice about FAOS programs, code reuse between projects. It is in particular what has made Linux the OS with the fastest-growing installed base, though I can't see how that could be true unless you lump all Windows together. Even lumping all NT together shouldn't work what with the 9x -> XP upgraders.

  • Is there any online shop where I can buy an Opteron 2x motherboard as well as assorted processors? I would love to have one of those beasts on my desk right now but I have not been able to track anything down, at least in Europe.

    Until I am able to buy Opteron motherboards and processors and build my own system, AMD64 is not here for me, unfortunately...

    • Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Informative)

      by d^2b ( 34992 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @06:53AM (#5860958) Homepage
      I saw opteron 242 processors on www.ncix.com
      (a canadian company) for about euro 290 for
      the retail box.

      (For you norteamericanos, that is CAD 468)

    • You can always try pricewatch and look for a vendor that will ship to Europe.

      http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?q c= %22OPTERON%22*%20AND%20%40totalcost%3E0%20AND%20%4 0minorder=1&cr=opteron&ne=11693&l=1164 7
      • Two problems:

        . Shipping to Europe will cost a fortune and will be here after at least one month. . Customs will add at least 20-30% to the price.

        So, basically, in order to order anything from the States, us Europeans have to pay much more to import it. Better wait a bit until the online shops catch up...

  • Will this "Technology Preview" feature modified components such (glibc, gcc, etc) or just redhat 9 with a patched kernel?

  • More Details (Score:5, Informative)

    by Laven ( 102436 ) * on Friday May 02, 2003 @07:18AM (#5861054)
    The RELEASE-NOTES of this technology preview appears to be almost exactly that of Red Hat Linux 9. Check out the discussion on AMD64-list [redhat.com]for more details of what this Linux is capable of. Or rather, read the List Archives [redhat.com].

    I personally ordered two Opteron servers this week. I plan on building an e-mail server and K12LTSP [k12ltsp.org] server using modified Red Hat Linux. My findings of success/failure when I figure out AMD64 Linux quirks will be posted to AMDMB.com [amdmb.com] in the coming weeks. (Also check out our Athlon Linux forum [amdforums.com].)

    From the AMD64-list discussion so far, there are only a few details:

    * Kernel and all applications 64-bit compiled. This includes support for the larger memory address space and 16 registers. (SPEED!)
    * AMD64 Linux *can* run 32-bit applications, unfortunately you would need 32-bit shared libraries that were not included in this technology preview. They said that they will be included in a possible future shipping distribution. I personally will try to research how to find/build these 32-bit shared libraries for myself, although I suspect it will show up on amd64-list soon enough.
    * Existing 32-bit closed source programs like Macromedia Flash plugin 6.0 for Linux [mplug.org] may work with 32-bit shared libraries, but not while running within 64-bit compiled Mozilla. You would need 32-bit compiled Mozilla. Bummer.

    • sweet, now i want an opteron, but i don't want the bill
      • For about 3 and a half grand (which isn't too steep, bout the same for a nice Xeon system). The chips are the most expensive part (about $750 each). Motherboard, $300. RAM, case, monitor, HDs, the rest are whatever you get them for.

        Personally, we spent $10,000 on one of these, put it had dual 20" LCDs on a Quadra4 GLX, and 3 each of WD 10k RPM and Seagate Barracuda V SATA HDs. And a Midiman 1010LT for sound, because we're snobs. w000000t. Can't wait to try this tech preview on it.
    • It just seems that the 64-bit ABI and the 32-bit one are incompatible (really not surprising... even pointer sizes are different).

      Anyway, we already have C++ ABI problem, so this one isn't much worse. What's more, hopefully every 64-bit compiled C++ application will have the gcc-3.2 ABI (old gccs don't even support x86-64), so no more C++ problems in the 64-bit world, and as a bonus, companies have finally found some incentive to make the not-very-standards-compliant code compile with newer gcc, so 32-b

      • Theoretically you could have 32-bit code calling 64-bit libraries, as long as the libraries never return pointers to allocated memory above the 4GB line. But I doubt that's provided for in the ABI. My guess is that app/library combinations must be 64-bit-only or 32-bit-only in order to work.

        And yes, amen to the whole C++ ABI thing. My only complaints are that the final solution involves yet another required library, libgcc_s.so, and AFAIK the libstdc++ API is never going to stabilize :(
  • I remember when the mmx processor came. It hade this all new instructions that would increase the preformance with over 400% or something :).. But there where no applications so all the mmx instructions did was increasing the cpu core -> making the cpu extra hot. Today we atleast have some programs that utilize the mmx instructions. But how long did it take? Now to the point. When they make a opteron dist "Windows 64 and Redhat for example" do they only make sure that all applications can run, like on
    • You forget that the Pentium (1) MMX processors doubled the L1 cache in the chip (16K to 32K I think), so even without MMX instructions in the software there was a good performance gain. As for the heat, they were still cooler than the Cyrix and AMD chips (only PowerPC's were running "cool" that year).
    • Porting to MMX/SSE/3DNow is not that simple, because they require parallelity in the code. Depending on the language and compiler, it can be automated to some extent, but usually the coder must explicitly state when it's OK to calculate some things in parallel.

      On the other hand, if your code is 64-bit clean (as Linux should be, as it runs on many platforms including SPARC and Alpha), it's mainly a matter of recompilation to take advantage of 64-bit processors. AFAIK, there are no new instructions introduc

    • > I remember when the mmx processor came. It hade this all new instructions
      > that would increase the preformance with over 400% or something :)..
      > But there where no applications so all the mmx instructions did was
      > increasing the cpu core -> making the cpu extra hot. Today we atleast
      > have some programs that utilize the mmx instructions. But
      > how long did it take? Now to the point. When they make a opteron
      > dist "Windows 64 and Redhat for example" do they only make sure that
      > all

  • Impossible! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @07:57AM (#5861220) Homepage Journal

    So you mean to tell me that Linux is available on a 64 bit architecture before Windows?! Does Steve "Mr. Innovation" Balmer know about this?

    We all know this is a hoax. It's not possible for open source software to "innovate"...

    • Windows has been available on Itanium for a couple of years now. Also, Windows 2k3 server for the AMD64 is in the same phase (alpha) as the Redhat offering.

      Also, read the release notes for the Redhat thingie and see if it is possible to have a proper workstation on that thing. To be fair, though, Mandrake appear to have a more complete offer for AMD64 than Redhat.

    • I remember that both Tom's and Ace's reviews of the Opteron used SuSE's distribution, which seems to be released earlier and (if I remember correctly) more near-production-ready.

    • gillbates: "Linux is available on a 64 bit architecture before Windows?!"

      Mr. Innovation: "Uhh... They must have stolen the code from SCO..." {talking to wristphone:} "Call Utah!"

  • I will wait for official SCO x86-64 support (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why does GCC support SCO UNIX, anyway?

  • Hardly news..... (Score:2, Informative)

    by jocks ( 56885 )
    I am surprised that this actually counts as news when SuSE repleased their 64bit version a couple of weeks ago.
    • Red Hat is the #1 Linux distro in North America. Slashdot is an admittedly US-centric site. So it an appropriate news story. Many of us Red Hat users are anxiously awaiting their X86_64 release.
    • Aye fair comment. I would have pointed out the North American bias but I did not want to become a flame grilled wopper! It will be interesting to see how Linux develops on 64bit architecture...lets face it, the application porting will be far, far more rapid than the rate of it's closed source cousin's.
      • Mostly so... I believe Oracle and IBM have already completed their port to AMD64... and Oracle is recommending using Linux for it's platform.... Check out http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/theme_pag es/index.html?linux_02032003.html It's great to see such big $$ support already.
  • If so, are there mobos available, too? Links would be appreciated.

  • Overheard at Intel... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Glock27 ( 446276 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @08:56AM (#5861527)
    "This thing is a steaming pile of crap, and we've spent almost ten years and billions of dollars!"

    OK, it wasn't overheard at Intel. But it should have been.

    SPEC2000 scores:

    Itanic2/1 GHz.: 810/1174 int/fp
    Opteron: 1202/1170 int/fp

    The integer score is important for many general-purpose computing tasks, like web serving and database.

    Gee, Opteron is MUCH less expensive, performs better, runs up to 8-way with off the shelf components and runs your 32-bit x86 code twice as fast and absolutely compatibly. Let me think about this... ;-)

    • Gee, Opteron is MUCH less expensive, performs better, runs up to 8-way with off the shelf components and runs your 32-bit x86 code twice as fast and absolutely compatibly. Let me think about this... ;-)

      I think all the current 64-bit CPU producers are thinking about this, too, and saying "oh" and "um" quite a bit trying to figure out there marketing plans.
      • echo "I think all the current 64-bit CPU producers are thinking about this, too, and saying \"oh\" and \"um\" quite a bit trying to figure out there marketing plans." | sed -e "s/there/their/g"
      • I think all the current 64-bit CPU producers are thinking about this, too, and saying "oh" and "um" quite a bit trying to figure out there marketing plans.

        Yah. Another important feature of Opteron is that memory bandwidth scales with additional CPUs in an SMP setup. That is sweet.

        • Another important feature of Opteron is that memory bandwidth scales with additional CPUs in an SMP setup.

          However, I think the bandwidth aggregates among the local memories attached to each CPU. To get maximum benefit, the OS kernel would need to know how to best schedule and allocate processes to prevent CPUs from accessing other CPUs' memories often.
    • To those who chimed in with "Overrated" mods...don't shoot the messenger. As someone said "To moderate is human, to reply divine". Let's see your rebuttal.

      BTW, I'm sorry about your Intel stock, especially regarding what's about to happen to it. ;-)

    • Gee, Opteron is MUCH less expensive, performs better, runs up to 8-way with off the shelf components and runs your 32-bit x86 code twice as fast and absolutely compatibly. Let me think about this... ;-)

      Clearly, with its low cost, comparable performance, and ease of porting 32-bit programs, AMD's Opteron is going to cut into Intel's Itanium sales.

      The real question is: what Itanium sales?

      I assume that AMD isn't just positioning the Opteron as an alternative to the Itanium, but also as a "power user" chip,
      • Clearly, with its low cost, comparable performance, and ease of porting 32-bit programs, AMD's Opteron is going to cut into Intel's Itanium sales.

        The real question is: what Itanium sales?

        Sure, Itanium sales are quite low right now. However, the whole idea of Itanium was to make a cheaper, faster, enterprise class server CPU that would kill SPARC, Alpha, PA-RISC and Power. It killed both HP architectures with marketing muscle alone. ;-) However, Itanic has decidely not lived up to the hype and the futur

    • m/s? (Score:1)

      by conway ( 536486 )
      299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

      Which universe are you from?
      I hope you mean km/s

    • except that opteron specint is an estimated 1202 for a 2.0ghz chip (which isn't shipping yet). it goes like this:
      • opteron 2.0ghz specint 1202 aka opteron 244
      • opteron 1.8ghz specint ~1100 aka opteron 243
      • opteron 1.6ghz specint ~950 aka opteron 242
      • opteron 1.4ghz specint ~820 aka opteron 241
      • itanium 1.0ghz specint 807
      • itanium 1.5ghz specint ??? (~1200 likely)

      you can't buy a 244 (or even a 243) yet, so comparing it to a shipping 1.0ghz itanium is not terribly valid

    • Gee, Opteron is MUCH less expensive, performs better, runs up to 8-way with off the shelf components and runs your 32-bit x86 code twice as fast and absolutely compatibly. Let me think about this... ;-)

      You also forgot: Runs twice as hot
  • What I would like to see Red Hat release is both the 32-bit and 64-bit X86 versions on one media set (DVD-ROM, CD-ROM) and automatically choose the correct platform to install. I don't want to have to manually choose which disk sets to bring along to install/upgrade a system.
  • "..inside sources say it's based on Red Hat 9 plus some updates."
    ...inside sources also say:

    forward 50
    right 90
    forward 50
    right 90
    forward 50
    right 90
    forward 50
    right 90

    Mmmm Hmmmm.
  • Maybe I'm the only one with a problem with this, but this is a https site with a bad certificate. Does anyone have this on a http site?

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