>That's what an Intel engineer was doing - stating that the AMD Athlon 64 is no good for the
> market but what is he comparing it to???? And why would thje market accept the Itanium and not AMD's Athlon 64?
Maybe it would be simpler to put it this way: Why ask a GM executive about the new Ford cars. What is he going to say?
Intel never shows all its cards, at least not without an NDA. (Non Disclosure Agreement) But here is what Intels plan appears to have been. I say appears. I have no inside information. The Itanium is radically different than any x86 CPU has been. It is not an x86 CPU. It is "far out." But Intel planned on superceding P3s with some Itanium-like processor after it got the super-duper real Itanium going well. That took longer than planned, and AMD's XPs seemed to be gaining on P3s, so instead of advanced P3s, Intel filled in with the P4, revised the first Itanium into Itanium2, and lengthed the timetable. With all the changes in the P4, it has become good enough to keep Intel mostly leading AMD. Intel is aware that the address space needs to be over 4 Gigabytes within the next year. To go over 4G, you need more bits in the address than 32. At this stage in technology, doubling it to to 64 bits is not hard. In all of its previous history, Intel has been ready way in advance of the time that memory was cheap enough to exceed its CPU's memory address space, so Intel is now way behind where you would have expected them to be. But Intel doesn't want to undercut the Itanium-like home processor it will becoming out with in the next couple of years,which will have as one of its features that it is 64 bit. That has put AMD in a difficult position in designing its next generation Athlons. They needed it to be 64 bit to be on the expected, normal time line. Without Intel defining what a next generation, 64 bit processor should be, AMD had to hang their own ideas out there and see if people go for it; and people have never gone along with AMD. They always go Intel's way. There are a lot of practical reasons why.
AMDs 64 bit extensions are about as simple and direct as they could possibly be. To use 64 bit addresses you need to have 64 bit wide registers. With the amount of registers that even present CPUs have behind-the-scenes, doubling the available general purpose registers from 8 to 16 is trivial. Programmers alway like more registers. It makes programs go faster, and you don't have to juggle things on an off the CPU so much. The SSE2 instructions that Intel orginated have proven to speed things up on some pretty popular CPU uses, so AMD has doubled the number of 128 bit registers that these instructions can use. Notice something here: while Intel's marketing spin-meisters are pooh-poohing 64 bits, Intel's SSE2 registers are 128 bit, the MMX registers are 64 bit, and floating point registers are 80 bit. People also should know that memory sticks have been 64 bits wide for years and years. It is about time the general purpose registers went to 64 bits.
The downplaying of 64 bits is going too far IMO. To some extent, the negativism was required if people were thinking doubling the number of bits is going to double the speed. No. It could come close to that only if the data type you are working on is 64 bits wide, or comes in 64 bit chunks. Only in special parts of certain types of programs is that true. Only in those parts could the speed be doubled or quadrupled. But for most of that type of data, present CPUs are already 128 bits wide, as I mentioned. That leaves some of the in-between data processing that won't have to be narrowed to 32 bit pieces to get done; data types for which there are no special SSE2 style instructions; and data types that the future will define. Believe it or not, there was a time when there was no MPG, no mp3, and no jpg. There will be new data types in the future.
The major use for 64 bits is the larger amount of memory. (and more memory in itself usually speeds up things.) Maybe 4G seems like a lot. But right now people don't get worked up about 2 512K sticks = 1G. When the new generation of memory chips comes along, they quaduple the size. So in a roughly a years time, or maybe 2, 4G will cost about what 1 G does now. It won't stop there. It never has. If anything, the growth is accelerating.
For most people 512K is so cheap they get that amount even though they could do with less. They do enjoy some benefit from the 512K. Some people do a little more ambitious things with their computers, and therefore do not consider the price of 1 G very much. Where computers make money for their owners, the price of 4G or 16G is nothing to get concerned about. In a few years that will be minimal in a home computer. In order for that to happen, development has to begin now. But development cannot begin without a defined CPU in place. That can only happen once a CPU is released. That's why 64 bit computers should be out now. Intel is not saying what the 64 bit CPU is going to be, so no one can develop for it. They are holding back computer technology in the mass market, when they have in the past alway been ahead of it; way, way ahead of it. Maybe they are behind because they tried to make a leap with the Itanium and can't make a go of it.
AMDs streamlined method of handling memory in 64 bit mode is going to yield greater and greater speed increases as the memory size grows far beyond 4G. I'm sure Intel has some good ideas about what the future 64 bit computer is going to be, but they are not commiting to anything. Instead the spin-meisters are pretending 64 bits is not going to happen. Anybody that has followed computer technology for the last 20 years know that it is.
My second computer had 32K, which cost $500, and $500 was a lot more money back then. That was the Intel 8080 era. The 8080 was considered an 8 bit computer, but it had a 16 bit address width. The full address space was 64K. That was an immense amount and would have cost a fortune when Intel introduced the 8080. I got in pretty late in the cycle and the price wasn't so bad. People wondered what you could do to use all 64K. But in a year or two everybody had 64K. Intel was introducing the 8086, and it had a whopping 1M address space, which boggled the imagination. Who could afford 1M of memory? It had 16 bit registers, which was exciting in a futuristic sort of way, but who really needed 16 bit computing power? The point: Intel was always leading the way, and paving the way. Yet, what seemed unreachable, was surpassed in a few years, and today you can only chuckle. 1G would have cost many millions of dollars!
If Intel were on its schedule, and leading the way, 4G would not be affordable.