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I remember being an early adopter of 64-bit Linux with my Athlon64 back in the day. Lots of stuff was broken and I got a lot of debate on whether it was any fa

I remember being an early adopter of 64-bit Linux with my Athlon64 back in the day. Lots of stuff was broken and I got a lot of debate on whether it was any faster or worthwhile at all. It's really cool to see the technology curve go full circle.

cptskippy 7y ago
Completely off topic but... Althlon64 was a swift kick in the nuts for Intel, but AMD really didn't followup until Ryzen. I wonder if they're going to stick around and fight this time.
- topbanana 7y ago
  They've got momentum on their side now, but intel won't bow down without a fight. I expect we'll see some real innovation over the next five years.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    The real question isn't if Intel will fight back but how. They've been known to innovate shady marketing tactics just as much as their CPU architecture.
- kbenson 7y ago
  Sometimes when the swift kick in the nuts is delivered to an 800-pound gorilla, it doesn't matter if you stay around to fight, you're outclassed. This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it...
  - lsofzz 7y ago
    > This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it... :-))))
- tyingq 7y ago
  Back then, AMD kind of had to license the x64 stuff to Intel for cross license reasons. They aren't under any pressure this time to give away anything.
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    Really? When did that change? I thought they had some sort of in-perpetuity cross licensing agreement going back to when AMD was a second source for x86 for Intel with Government contracts.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      Their advantage this time isn't the ISA. There's no "cross licensing" for the silicon design, fab choice, etc.
- lozaning 7y ago
  I've still got my AMD Athlon 64 3200+ in a bin somewhere. I remember being in sheer awe that i could just drop in a dual core cpu into my nforce4 based mobo. It felt revolutionary at the time.
- robothread 7y ago
  Well Intel wasn’t exactly sitting idle during the Athlon 64 era. It was just unfortunate that none of their plans worked out. NetBurst was a bust. IA-64 flopped too. Both were attempts to progress from the P6 architecture - which they felt had reached its limits. In the end, the market spoke, they want the P6. No one was willing to rewrite software (or even recompile). So back to the P6 in the form of the Pentium M followed by the Core /Core dual series and finally the i3/5/7/9 that we use today - which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core; as mentioned the P6 style design is pretty much tapped out and all they can do is “squeeze blood from stone” for a few percentage improvements here and there. AMD recently caught up but frankly, they aren’t doing much better. Performance per core is just on par with Intel. Their main selling point is that they made it cheaper by splitting the L3 cache in 2 - the Ryzen is basically 2 quad-cores glued together for better yields.
  - benou 7y ago
    > which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core Not sure which data you refer to? I just made a comparison on a single-threaded integer-heavy code between my old Core2 Duo and a Skylake, and just got x16 normalized perf improvement (from 2.5-cycles/byte to 0.15). Same code, same compiler. So sure, progress have slowed down and they are adding more and more specialized stuff (AVX-512, AES-NI...) but still. Edited for clarity.
gdxhyrd 7y ago
Worthwhile? We had PAE for a long time, sure, but I think it was fairly obvious when the Athlon 64 appeared that 4GB was not going to cut it, given some people already had 1GB at home...
- jdsully 7y ago
  At the time 1GB was a ton of memory and few applications would use anywhere near that. A 64-bit kernel took on fairly quickly but actually compiling 64-bit applications took a lot longer. Consensus at the time was the memory overhead of larger pointers outweighed the benefits of extra registers.
  - srgpqt 7y ago
    1GB is still a lot of memory. If anything, we've only learned to squander all available memory.
    - vokep 7y ago
      This. The basic stuff they did back then didn't magically inflate. Except, it seems from afar that thats exactly what happened. But it didn't, and it doesn't have to look like that from afar.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Go ahead and buffer 4k video streams to disk, I dare you :) There's a reason that even modern appliance platforms like Apple/Android TV need multiple GBs of memory, and it ain't bloat.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        I wouldn’t be so sure.
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        What are you calling "disk" here? It's not every day that I see a machine with a disk slower than its network connection.
nickysielicki 7y ago
My dad bought me an Anthlon64 machine for Christmas and we put it together. Not know much about anything, I remember being pissed off/confused that I didn’t have Windows XP 64-bit in spite of having that Anthlon64 sticker on the front. A few years later my brother was starting a web server to host a forum for the Digital TV switch-over focused on the Madison, WI market, shout-out and RIP madcityhd.com Watching him setup Fedora on the box on the floor of his bedroom and using Compiz wobbly-windows was enough to hook me. I stole his install CD and nuked my drive (much to the irritation of my dad, who knew that I would be stealing one of his nights to reinstall Windows when I eventually realized could no longer play counter-strike), It was fun to see it come full-circle a year or two after I was ticked-off about my Anthlon64 not running a 64 bit operating system, when I started trying other distos and realized, “Hey, I can actually use the 64 bit one now!” Fun times. I wonder how many kids got hooked on Linux by wobbly windows. I know that’s what brought me in, haha.
- Ellipsis753 7y ago
  Wobbly windows were the main reason I switched to Linux. Been using it for everything ever since... Kind of amazing that could be a "killer app".
- BuildTheRobots 7y ago
  There was actually a 64bit version of Windows XP which I inflicted on my dad for a while - sounds like you did well to avoid it ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Ed...
lazyguy2 7y ago
For several years I ran a 64bit kernel with 32bit userland. That way I was compatible with games and most other things without having to deal with increased memory usage and compatibility hacks.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- koolba 7y ago
  There’s an even better target, x32, but sadly it never got much traction and is deprecated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI The idea is to expose the 64-bit instruction set and registers, but keep memory and pointers per-process 32-bit as most apps use less than 4 GB of memory.
  - nwmcsween 7y ago
    x32 failed due to the horribly botched ABI that was created.
noobermin 7y ago
Let's just hope we don't go through the same thing when we switch to 128-bit. We ought to learn from our mistakes when we do this whole thing again. And yes, before people flare me for this, don't pretend it isn't possible, recall that once upon a time 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  Nobody ever thought that, and mindlessly repeating just means we don't learn anything.
- eru 7y ago
  Why would we want to switch to 128 bit addresses? Do you know how much memory we can address with 64 bit? (64 bit for addresses was arguably a mistake. 48 bit word size would probably have been better, but doesn't sound as cool.) Having said that, 128 bit can make sense for certain calculations. So floating point calculations and GPUs support long registers for some of what they are doing. (And having said that, Google figured out that they don't actually need all that precision when using GPUs for machine learning, and made TPUs with much smaller words.)
  - imron 7y ago
    > Why would we want to switch to 128 bit addresses? How else are you going to have more than 16 exabytes of RAM?
    - eru 7y ago
      Exactly, you probably won't. And I don't mean that in an absolute sense. People might very well get up to those orders of magnitude of RAM; but you are unlikely to have that amount of RAM available to a single processor. The extra margin of the 64 bit might help with address space randomization, though.
    - jagger27 7y ago
      Memory banking is the obvious and ancient solution. PAE is another.

cptskippy 7y ago

Completely off topic but... Althlon64 was a swift kick in the nuts for Intel, but AMD really didn't followup until Ryzen. I wonder if they're going to stick around and fight this time.

topbanana 7y ago
They've got momentum on their side now, but intel won't bow down without a fight. I expect we'll see some real innovation over the next five years.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  The real question isn't if Intel will fight back but how. They've been known to innovate shady marketing tactics just as much as their CPU architecture.
kbenson 7y ago
Sometimes when the swift kick in the nuts is delivered to an 800-pound gorilla, it doesn't matter if you stay around to fight, you're outclassed. This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it...
- lsofzz 7y ago
  > This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it... :-))))
tyingq 7y ago
Back then, AMD kind of had to license the x64 stuff to Intel for cross license reasons. They aren't under any pressure this time to give away anything.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  Really? When did that change? I thought they had some sort of in-perpetuity cross licensing agreement going back to when AMD was a second source for x86 for Intel with Government contracts.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Their advantage this time isn't the ISA. There's no "cross licensing" for the silicon design, fab choice, etc.
lozaning 7y ago
I've still got my AMD Athlon 64 3200+ in a bin somewhere. I remember being in sheer awe that i could just drop in a dual core cpu into my nforce4 based mobo. It felt revolutionary at the time.
robothread 7y ago
Well Intel wasn’t exactly sitting idle during the Athlon 64 era. It was just unfortunate that none of their plans worked out. NetBurst was a bust. IA-64 flopped too. Both were attempts to progress from the P6 architecture - which they felt had reached its limits. In the end, the market spoke, they want the P6. No one was willing to rewrite software (or even recompile). So back to the P6 in the form of the Pentium M followed by the Core /Core dual series and finally the i3/5/7/9 that we use today - which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core; as mentioned the P6 style design is pretty much tapped out and all they can do is “squeeze blood from stone” for a few percentage improvements here and there. AMD recently caught up but frankly, they aren’t doing much better. Performance per core is just on par with Intel. Their main selling point is that they made it cheaper by splitting the L3 cache in 2 - the Ryzen is basically 2 quad-cores glued together for better yields.
- benou 7y ago
  > which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core Not sure which data you refer to? I just made a comparison on a single-threaded integer-heavy code between my old Core2 Duo and a Skylake, and just got x16 normalized perf improvement (from 2.5-cycles/byte to 0.15). Same code, same compiler. So sure, progress have slowed down and they are adding more and more specialized stuff (AVX-512, AES-NI...) but still. Edited for clarity.

gdxhyrd 7y ago

Worthwhile? We had PAE for a long time, sure, but I think it was fairly obvious when the Athlon 64 appeared that 4GB was not going to cut it, given some people already had 1GB at home...

jdsully 7y ago
At the time 1GB was a ton of memory and few applications would use anywhere near that. A 64-bit kernel took on fairly quickly but actually compiling 64-bit applications took a lot longer. Consensus at the time was the memory overhead of larger pointers outweighed the benefits of extra registers.
- srgpqt 7y ago
  1GB is still a lot of memory. If anything, we've only learned to squander all available memory.
  - vokep 7y ago
    This. The basic stuff they did back then didn't magically inflate. Except, it seems from afar that thats exactly what happened. But it didn't, and it doesn't have to look like that from afar.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Go ahead and buffer 4k video streams to disk, I dare you :) There's a reason that even modern appliance platforms like Apple/Android TV need multiple GBs of memory, and it ain't bloat.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I wouldn’t be so sure.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      What are you calling "disk" here? It's not every day that I see a machine with a disk slower than its network connection.

nickysielicki 7y ago

My dad bought me an Anthlon64 machine for Christmas and we put it together. Not know much about anything, I remember being pissed off/confused that I didn’t have Windows XP 64-bit in spite of having that Anthlon64 sticker on the front. A few years later my brother was starting a web server to host a forum for the Digital TV switch-over focused on the Madison, WI market, shout-out and RIP madcityhd.com Watching him setup Fedora on the box on the floor of his bedroom and using Compiz wobbly-windows was enough to hook me. I stole his install CD and nuked my drive (much to the irritation of my dad, who knew that I would be stealing one of his nights to reinstall Windows when I eventually realized could no longer play counter-strike), It was fun to see it come full-circle a year or two after I was ticked-off about my Anthlon64 not running a 64 bit operating system, when I started trying other distos and realized, “Hey, I can actually use the 64 bit one now!” Fun times. I wonder how many kids got hooked on Linux by wobbly windows. I know that’s what brought me in, haha.

Ellipsis753 7y ago
Wobbly windows were the main reason I switched to Linux. Been using it for everything ever since... Kind of amazing that could be a "killer app".
BuildTheRobots 7y ago
There was actually a 64bit version of Windows XP which I inflicted on my dad for a while - sounds like you did well to avoid it ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Ed...

lazyguy2 7y ago

For several years I ran a 64bit kernel with 32bit userland. That way I was compatible with games and most other things without having to deal with increased memory usage and compatibility hacks.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
koolba 7y ago
There’s an even better target, x32, but sadly it never got much traction and is deprecated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI The idea is to expose the 64-bit instruction set and registers, but keep memory and pointers per-process 32-bit as most apps use less than 4 GB of memory.
- nwmcsween 7y ago
  x32 failed due to the horribly botched ABI that was created.

noobermin 7y ago

Let's just hope we don't go through the same thing when we switch to 128-bit. We ought to learn from our mistakes when we do this whole thing again. And yes, before people flare me for this, don't pretend it isn't possible, recall that once upon a time 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

tedunangst 7y ago
Nobody ever thought that, and mindlessly repeating just means we don't learn anything.
eru 7y ago
Why would we want to switch to 128 bit addresses? Do you know how much memory we can address with 64 bit? (64 bit for addresses was arguably a mistake. 48 bit word size would probably have been better, but doesn't sound as cool.) Having said that, 128 bit can make sense for certain calculations. So floating point calculations and GPUs support long registers for some of what they are doing. (And having said that, Google figured out that they don't actually need all that precision when using GPUs for machine learning, and made TPUs with much smaller words.)
- imron 7y ago
  > Why would we want to switch to 128 bit addresses? How else are you going to have more than 16 exabytes of RAM?
  - eru 7y ago
    Exactly, you probably won't. And I don't mean that in an absolute sense. People might very well get up to those orders of magnitude of RAM; but you are unlikely to have that amount of RAM available to a single processor. The extra margin of the 64 bit might help with address space randomization, though.
  - jagger27 7y ago
    Memory banking is the obvious and ancient solution. PAE is another.