EETimes heeft een artikeltje in elkaar gedrukt met info over de Intel Itanium/Merced, AMD SledgeHammer/K8 en de extreem brute IBM Power4. Hier een paar snippers:
AMD vice president of engineering Fred Weber argued at the Microprocessor Forum here that Intel was trying to turn the X86 architecture into a "second-class citizen. With Itanium, is Intel trying to do something great, or just something that is hard?" he asked."With Sledgehammer and the X86-64 instruction set, AMD will show that X86 has viability well into the future. We will provide the best 32-bit computing platform, while providing a future path to 64 bits that solves the primary problem: access to larger memory. Beyond additional memory, the enterprise world has few needs for 64-bit architectures," Weber said in an interview.
By putting two processor cores on the same die, hiking the core frequency beyond a gigahertz and using deeper pipelining, Weber said Sledgehammer will offer performance equal to or better than Itanium's, and protect customers' existing applications by running X86-based code without alteration.
AMD said it will add technical floating-point capabilities to Sledgehammer and the X86-64 instruction set. Weber said dual 32-bit and 64-bit support will be possible by "defining a mode in which all instructions act on 64-bit data."
[...] Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64 (Saratoga, Calif.), said AMD is betting that the X86 architecture can be extended at least for the next decade, "which is a lifetime in this industry.
"If Alpha, AMD and Itanium all come in at roughly equal performance, then AMD will have the advantage because it will be superior at 32-bit [IA-32] processing," Brookwood said. "Then they can say, 'you get 64 bits for free.' Intel has defined a radical path, while AMD has taken an evolutionary approach, and many people prefer the evolutionary way because it is safer."
Dit verhaaltje lezen we uit bij EETimes.
