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 The memory interface is on the processor, and the traditional bus has been replaced by networks to communicate with the I/O. This allows glueless 4 way SMP setups, better I/O bandwidth, and better memory latency.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?
