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Commodity Processors

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Anonymous   03-04-2002 at 05:55:52 PM

It's hard for me to understand all the excitement about Hammer or Itanium.

I can only see them in niche markets such as Workstation/Servers. There have been plenty of processors faster than Intels or AMD's x86. Alpha even had a dedicated version of Windows for some years, but it never gained popularity in the Consumer market. My understanding is that Itanium does NOT have x86 compatibility. If this is true, it will suffer the same fate as Alpha..or worse :-). Hammer I understand will have x86 compatibility. This is a significant step in the right direction, however its ability to emulate will need to be rock solid and perform well. However, the same old problem Alpha had of "waiting for applications to be specifically compiled for the new architecture" is still here. I certainly won't be holding my breath waiting for companies to do this.

Commodity Processors
This is where we want to be. We are still stuck in an x86 world. There needs to be some key things before we can see widespread adoption of different hardware architecute's such as Itanium or Hammer:

1) Platform Independent Software - Java popularized this; Microsoft .NET continues it and will mean that most software in the future is platform independent.
2) Highly Portable Operating System - Windows NT/W2K/XP already fits this bill. The NT kernal has been ported to Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and even 2 others I cant remember.
If Microsoft see's opportunity, it will port to a hardware platform. Linux and Unix of course has been doing this for decades.
3) Platform Independant Hardware - Add in cards such as IDE, SCSI, Video, & Network Adapters all have software that is currently x86 specific. When the Hammer and Itanium do come out, dont expect to buy your favorite GFORCE card and plug it in. You'll have to wait for a card specific to that platform. :-( This is a specific area that I'm interested in feedback on. I'm currently unaware of any movement to achieve any type of low level BIOS hardware independence.

So, I have to say...there is still much work to be done before I will get excited about any new architecture.

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girish   03-04-2002 at 06:25:10 PM
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Well, wish it would that easy!

We are truely stuck with x86 architecture, and still want all the stuff to be compatible with x86! There were two major architectures in the begining, the Motorola 68x and the Intel x86, IBM chose x86 and the rest is history! Imagine what would have been if they would have chosen the Motorola chip, all x86 chips would have been as costly as today's Macs and PowerPCs all the software and hardware would have been developen with the 68x in mind. No wonder they are pallindromes, exact opposite of each other - 68x v/s x86! They even have exactly reverse byte order, different I/O mapping, and register mapping, core architecture...!

Anyway, there are certain misconceptions about platform indepedence.
1. As for java, almost all major companies including Sun, M$, IBM, Netscape have their own extensions to the language, VM and architecture so that it isnt really a platform independant, at least not with versions higher than 1.1!

2. Heard the PowerPC would be emulating other architectures, then the Crusoe doing it, guess it would be a while till a single chip supports more than one architecture. Portability as we have today is still plagued with core architectural issues of the processors and the platform!

3. The PCI bus is used on Macs, SCSI, IDE interfaces could also be ported to mac. One needs the right drivers and right integration. All these hardware interfaces are really architecture independant, and the driver can translate between the subtle differences. I wish there could be a mac with as open a architecture as the IBM PC and compatibles. I would then check my GeForce Ti500 on a Mac of it fails on a PC, I would switch hard drives and transfer large files across different systems.

I would happen. It would definitely happen if all the companies come together and develop single standards to be followed, single interfaces to be designed and single specifications to be shared! Unfortunately this constitutes a major day-dream of extra high scale!

If it would have been so, the x86 architecture wouldnt have been split at 64 bits. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator would have used the same HTML tags and syntax. Java would run with full compatibility across all VMs on all platforms. Windows would be supporting the ext2/3 fs!...
..
....
.....

girish

<font color=red>Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

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AMD_Man   03-04-2002 at 06:37:12 PM
- 0 +

The Hammer is a x86-64 processor which means it will support all the current apps and OSs out of the box. The transition to 64-bit will be a slow one but the hardware must always come before the software.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

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girish   03-04-2002 at 07:07:16 PM
- 0 +

yeah, hardware must come first and then slowly software arrives!

it took 10 years for an OS to truely utilise the protected mode of the 386! the hardware was ready in 1983, but the OS that took advantage of it to the fullest dint arrive till 1993 with the Windows NT!

<font color=red>Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

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