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So .... when will it ship? No mention of physical products anywhere. I wonder why this long delays are still necessary. In the old days yes as there were so ma

So .... when will it ship? No mention of physical products anywhere. I wonder why this long delays are still necessary. In the old days yes as there were so many parties to coordinate but nowadays, in theory, Intel could release hardware, the new ISA and compiler/OS patches and binaries on the same day.

wmf 3y ago
They don't want it to leak so they at least need to announce it before engineering samples go out.
TheCondor 3y ago
They floated a "white paper" a few months back about removing legacy instructions. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... Taking a little time with these sorts of things isn't bad. This will essentially be a new epic where AMD and Intel may end up being incompatible, at least for a while, there are tooling changes to make, OS support, all sorts of things. If they're serious about dropping 16bit and 32bit from the architecture, doing it during a change like this might make some sense. Do it wrong and they could Osborn themselves, but an Apple like migration strategy would be nice and I'd appreciate it.
mschuster91 3y ago
They announce it in time so that llvm, gcc, MSVC, Java, .NET and the browser JS engine vendors can update their stacks to be ready when the silicon ships. After all why spend a shitload of money on developing a feature you'll want to market when there won't be any reason for customers to buy your new hardware?
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Intel employee people who work on Java and LLVM at least, so they could release their own versions of those. I guess V8 wouldn't be hard to add. The main reason to do a coordinated release would be competitive advantage, I guess, plus to ensure that there are actually compilers that support their new instructions available right from the start. Intel already release their own Linux distro optimized for their chips because other vendors were targeting the lowest common denominator
jcranmer 3y ago
> I wonder why this long delays are still necessary. In the old days yes as there were so many parties to coordinate but nowadays, in theory, Intel could release hardware, the new ISA and compiler/OS patches and binaries on the same day. Most new ISA support requires at least minimal support from the OS to use correctly (e.g., something like saving state on context switching, or reporting hardware support bits correctly). Releasing patches on the same day you release hardware means the new features are literally unusable for all of your customers, and it generally takes several months to go from a patch to a usable OS release. You could in theory release the patches on the same day as the new ISA documentation, but in practice, it's likely to take some time because the people writing the patches aren't the people writing the new ISA whitepapers and approving their publication and it takes time to go from "oh, I can talk about this now" to actually doing so.
adrian_b 3y ago
No earlier than Q1 2025. None of the products announced for 2024 (e.g. Sierra Forrest, Granite Rapids, Arrow Lake, Arrow Lake S, Lunar Lake) support this.
userbinator 3y ago
I wonder why this long delays are still necessary Making sure the thing actually works? At least I hope they're still doing that... and it's ironic to see this comment at the same time a rather horrible bug was discovered in AMD's CPUs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848680 If anything, Intel should probably slow down and take more care: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16058920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16058920

wmf 3y ago

They don't want it to leak so they at least need to announce it before engineering samples go out.

TheCondor 3y ago

They floated a "white paper" a few months back about removing legacy instructions. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... Taking a little time with these sorts of things isn't bad. This will essentially be a new epic where AMD and Intel may end up being incompatible, at least for a while, there are tooling changes to make, OS support, all sorts of things. If they're serious about dropping 16bit and 32bit from the architecture, doing it during a change like this might make some sense. Do it wrong and they could Osborn themselves, but an Apple like migration strategy would be nice and I'd appreciate it.

mschuster91 3y ago

They announce it in time so that llvm, gcc, MSVC, Java, .NET and the browser JS engine vendors can update their stacks to be ready when the silicon ships. After all why spend a shitload of money on developing a feature you'll want to market when there won't be any reason for customers to buy your new hardware?

mike_hearn 3y ago
Intel employee people who work on Java and LLVM at least, so they could release their own versions of those. I guess V8 wouldn't be hard to add. The main reason to do a coordinated release would be competitive advantage, I guess, plus to ensure that there are actually compilers that support their new instructions available right from the start. Intel already release their own Linux distro optimized for their chips because other vendors were targeting the lowest common denominator

jcranmer 3y ago

> I wonder why this long delays are still necessary. In the old days yes as there were so many parties to coordinate but nowadays, in theory, Intel could release hardware, the new ISA and compiler/OS patches and binaries on the same day. Most new ISA support requires at least minimal support from the OS to use correctly (e.g., something like saving state on context switching, or reporting hardware support bits correctly). Releasing patches on the same day you release hardware means the new features are literally unusable for all of your customers, and it generally takes several months to go from a patch to a usable OS release. You could in theory release the patches on the same day as the new ISA documentation, but in practice, it's likely to take some time because the people writing the patches aren't the people writing the new ISA whitepapers and approving their publication and it takes time to go from "oh, I can talk about this now" to actually doing so.

adrian_b 3y ago

No earlier than Q1 2025. None of the products announced for 2024 (e.g. Sierra Forrest, Granite Rapids, Arrow Lake, Arrow Lake S, Lunar Lake) support this.

userbinator 3y ago

I wonder why this long delays are still necessary Making sure the thing actually works? At least I hope they're still doing that... and it's ironic to see this comment at the same time a rather horrible bug was discovered in AMD's CPUs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848680 If anything, Intel should probably slow down and take more care: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16058920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16058920