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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: bloodline on January 25, 2003, 02:45:20 PM
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It is known to many here that I'm quite a fan of the new Hammer aka Athlon64 architecture.
I have decided to start a new thread so that other who may be interesed can disscuss the technology involved. I don't want the usuall PPC is better than x86 or x86 is better than PPC trolls posting.
I think it would be fun to compare my two favourite Processors at this time, the Power4 and the Athlon64. Saddly I can't include the beautiful Alpha because Intel have killed it by forcing the feature creep that is Itanic.....
Here is a nice little post about the benefits of Athlon64 over the Itanic;
Yammer the Hammer
No, he hasn't seen what he describes as "rumors" of Yamhill, Intel's own 64bit skunkworks project, but commends AMD's Hammer as a better approach.
"I think AMD is on the right track," says Nick.
"They've made the core simpler, and that makes it smaller, leaving room for much larger caches."
"The Hammer approach is 'we know how to do a CISC to RISC, how to make that RISC very fast, we know what few changes in the instruction set architecture would make it lots better - 16 general purpose registers, 16 floating point registers instead of the 8 entry stack from the 386 days - so let's do that'.
"This also gave them the ability to really concentrate on the interfaces. The memory interface is on the processor, and the traditional bus has been replaced by networks to communicate with the I/O. This allows glueless 4 way SMP setups, better I/O bandwidth, and better memory latency. It cuts out the chipset when going to memory, which saves 2 pin crossings and a bunch of traditionally slower chipset logic."
"If you want backward compatibility and performance, go Hammer," he recommends. "If you want backward compatibility and performance isn't such an issue, buy Transmeta to translate that old code."
And I quote:
Just my opinion, Anyone beg to differ?
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I can't differ with the statement that it is your own opinion or that the subject is interesting but this:
"If you want backward compatibility and performance isn't such an issue, buy Transmeta to translate that old code."
I so much hairy plums. Transmetas direction has changed so much that they cannot translate anything useful to anything else useful and instead have concentrated on low consumption chips.
You might go the way of FPGA but they arent complex enough to simulate a pentium at a reasonable cost yet.
No, my dream is to have a z/Series z800 sitting under my desk.
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haha! i have the complete set of amd programmers manuals for those cpus! hardcopy! plus a cd
worth ~ $98 allup, i got them for free!
sent from austin, TX to melbourne australia for no charge to me!!
:-D
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iamaboringperson wrote:
haha! i have the complete set of amd programmers manuals for those cpus! hardcopy! plus a cd
worth ~ $98 allup, i got them for free!
sent from austin, TX to melbourne australia for no charge to me!!
:-D
That's not fair, they won't send them to England :-(
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sure? did remember to say pleeeeeeeseee!
thats a shame! because they are really nice books! 6 volumes! very detailed! + of cource the CD containing PDF versions of them!
i now know precicely the +'s & -'s of that cpu!
:-P :-P :-P
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Hmmm, I'm always polite... I guess they like you better :-)
The PDF are avaiable, but I would prefer hard copies... where did you order them from?
I Emailed their Sales Dept.
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Athlon 64 fixes a lot about the x86 ISA that was wrong in the first place. Sure, it isn't the nicest ISA in existence, but now it at least has a reasonable number of registers, etc.
Power4 is nice as well - lets talk about the IBM 970 however as this is a more realistic competitor. A very nice chip as well, it should compete and compare very well with Hammer at similar clock speeds. They both use next generation interfaces to the rest of the system (HyperTransport for Hammer, possibly HyperTransport for the IBM970, but it could be something similar instead), the Hammer has an onboard memory controller (or two) (dunno about the IBM970 here), they are both designed to scale very well (8 processors without special hardware for Hammer, 16 for IBM970), etc.
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Hattig wrote:
Athlon 64 fixes a lot about the x86 ISA that was wrong in the first place. Sure, it isn't the nicest ISA in existence, but now it at least has a reasonable number of registers, etc.
Power4 is nice as well - lets talk about the IBM 970 however as this is a more realistic competitor. A very nice chip as well, it should compete and compare very well with Hammer at similar clock speeds. They both use next generation interfaces to the rest of the system (HyperTransport for Hammer, possibly HyperTransport for the IBM970, but it could be something similar instead), the Hammer has an onboard memory controller (or two) (dunno about the IBM970 here), they are both designed to scale very well (8 processors without special hardware for Hammer, 16 for IBM970), etc.
Ahhh yes, the 970. That is a nice chip, but I will is more expensive IIRC. Hammer is aimed at the desktop market which should keep cpu and main board prices down.