64 Bit CPU and Memory, Alpha

[asian1]

Hi
Intel had announced new 600 series Pentium 4 with 64 bit Memory Interface.
Is this the start of true 64 bit era for Intel CPU?

Are AMD Athlon 64 the pioneer of 64 bit era on X86 compatible CPU?

What happen to the pioneer of 64 bit CPU: Alpha?

[the_leander]

asian1 wrote:
Hi
Intel had announced new 600 series Pentium 4 with 64 bit Memory Interface.
Is this the start of true 64 bit era for Intel CPU?

Are AMD Athlon 64 the pioneer of 64 bit era on X86 compatible CPU?

What happen to the pioneer of 64 bit CPU: Alpha?

Xeons have had 64bit versions out for a while now, and Itanium is also 64bit iirc. Its only the the P4 that has stubburnly remained as a 32 bit only system.

AMD certainly have pioneered in this arena - they caught Intel completely off guard with the Athlon64 and completely blew out the Itanium with their Opteron cpus.

I do recall once seeing a 400Mhz Alpha Laptop running windowsNT when comparative X86 laptops were topping out at around 150Mhz. Certainly they were great innovators, HP should be shot for not continuing the line.

[bloodline]

asian1 wrote:
Hi
Intel had announced new 600 series Pentium 4 with 64 bit Memory Interface.
Is this the start of true 64 bit era for Intel CPU?

Are AMD Athlon 64 the pioneer of 64 bit era on X86 compatible CPU?

What happen to the pioneer of 64 bit CPU: Alpha?

Err.. Memory interface? The Pentium/Athlon etc have always a 64bit memory interface... the new Athlon64's have a 128bit memory interface (dual 64bit channels that run as one 128), that's why they need a matched pair of DIMMs (184pin DIMM's being 64bit).

Um... You might be talking about 64bit addessing... in that case, the Athlon64 as 48 bit addressing and the new P4's will have have it too.

The old Xeons had 36bit adressing (which worked by paging memory in and out of the 4gig memory space). The new 64bit instruction set as designed by AMD allows for flat memory addressing (no nasty paging).