4 ms·
They were able to lead with AMD64 because of their incredibly price/performance at the turn of the centry. Late 90s the K6x chips were breathing new life into S
by burnte 11y ago
They were able to lead with AMD64 because of their incredibly price/performance at the turn of the centry. Late 90s the K6x chips were breathing new life into Socket 7 motherboards and existing systems, and a couple years later the Athlon was saving peple a hundred or more dollars to get a system that outperformed the Pentium 4 and produced significantly less heat. This helped them grow their marketshare significantly, which meant when we needed 64bit computing, we had two viable companies to pick from, rather than one giant and one minor also-ran.
Intel still acted like they were the market dictator (which they weren't at that time) and said "IA64 is the way forward, dump x86!" This was astounding from Intel as for decades they had been the key drummer on the backwards-compatible drum, making sure each new x86 CPU could run the old existing code. Now suddenly they're saying dump decades of installed base. AMD took advantage of their increased marketshare and said, "Hey, we have a 64bit solution for x86 that keeps your old code, and lets you create 64bit code for the future without relearning a new, complicated architecture." IA64 was EPIC, meaning Extremely Parallel Instruction Computing. AMD64 was x86 with a whole new set of 64bit extensions but with x86 compatibility and familiarity, which is exactly what Intel did when they extended x86 into the 32bit world with the i386. Those two factors combined are why AMD64 became the defacto standard. Neither would have helped without the other.
- mnw21cam 11y agoEPIC - Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio... That means that the compiler works out the parallelism rather than the CPU, which is meant to reduce the amount of silicon wasted on instruction decode/parallelism. Anyone remember Transmeta?
- yvdriess 11y agoYes, Transmeta was bought by Intel. x86, despite its quirks, does not seem to be holding back the hardware too much. The silicon for decode/ILP does a fantastic job.
- Symmetry 11y agoIntel just liscenced their patents the same way that NVidia did. NVidia later hired much of the team and their Project Denver core is essentially the Efficeon 2.0.
- Symmetry 11y agoTransmeta is more a traditional VLIW processor which is a bit different in some ways that EPIC. On an Itanium you're indicating to the chips that these N instructions can take place on the same clock cycle (even if they're spread out across multiple cycles in theory) and there are some nifty tricks with trying to reduce memory latency variability. Transmeta had what's known as an exposed pipeline VLIW design. If you tell the multiplier to do it's thing and put the result in Register 6 then you can still read the previous value from register 6 until the multiplication is done. So you always need to recompile for each version of the hardware.
- burnte 11y agoMy bad, I don't know why I typed extremely. however, while yes the compiler does a lot of work, it's an entirely different method of programming than most coders are used to, which make it painful to change to.
- derekp7 11y agoThe funny thing is, the number of people I've worked with (that should know better), who think Intel came up with x86-64, instead of Intel copying from AMD. And there was no way I could convince them otherwise.