Intel CT, AMD 64, PPC

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asian1 wrote:
Hello
Intel had announced its CT 64 bit extension to X86 instruction set.
They plan to release Prescot, Tejas, Galatin, and Potomac CPU that use the extension.
AMD also announce 64 bit extension and have real 64 bit CPU: opteron.
Is it possible for Motorola to release G4 with 64 bit instruction set extension, but with the same bus, chipset etc?

The PPC spec provides support for 64bit. The IBM PPC970 is 64bit in the same way as the Opteron.

The G4 can't be made 64bit.

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Dr_Righteous wrote:
Think this might have something to do with the technology sharing between AMD and Motorola? :-D

Actually not AMD and Motorola, but AMD and IBM. It's no coincidence that the AMD Opteron and the IBM PPC970 have similar thermal and performance characteristics.

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lordv wrote:
Why do you ever need 64bit? Do you want to have laarge memory (>>4Gb) and run faast server? I think cpu with 64bit integers is quite useless for home... Anyway ppc's have now fpu with doubles (56bit mantissa) and altivec for simd data processing.

You make me wonder why we all upgraded to the 16bit 68000 based Amiga when the 8bit 6502 based C64 was fine for most users needs.

Think ahead, don't get stuck in the past.

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crystall wrote:

Actually not AMD and Motorola, but AMD and IBM. It's no coincidence that the AMD Opteron and the IBM PPC970 have similar thermal and performance characteristics.

This is coincidence, the 970 and K8 had been in development since way before AMD and IBM joined forces. IBM had a marginal impact on the K8 design only when it came to optimizing its SOI circuits, a field in which IBM had much more experience than AMD. Consider that AMD's current process and the future 90nm SOI process has been designed together with Motorola, not IBM. Their 65nm process will be jointly developed with IBM. Also the next processors which will come out from them will probably have much more in common since now both their development teams are working side by side at the IBM East Fishkill facility.

Exciting, isn't it?