“Advanced Micro Devices and Apple Computer will likely tout that they can deliver 64-bit computing to desktops this year, but Intel is in no hurry.”
“Two of the company’s top researchers said that a lack of applications, existing circumstances in the memory market, and the inherent challenges in getting the industry and consumers to migrate to new chips will likely keep Intel from coming out with a 64-bit chip–similar to those found in high-end servers and workstations–for PCs for years.”
“‘It could be the end of the decade’ before mainstream desktops need more than 4GB of memory, one of the chief reasons to move to 64-bit chips, Justin Rattner, a senior fellow at Intel, said during an interview at the Intel Developer Forum taking place in San Jose, Calif., this week.”
“Rattner’s comments echoed statements from Intel President Paul Otellini, who said in an interview last year that Intel may not be compelled to produce a 64-bit desktop chip until 2008 or even 2009,” reports ZDNet. Full story here.
MacDailyNews take: It’ll be interesting to see the marketing if it actually does end up that Apple has 64-bit Power Macs vs. 32-bit Intel Wintel boxes. AMD is the wildcard, as are the CPU choices of the Wintel box assemblers such as Dell, HP, and Gateway (if they’re still in business).
Your final parenthetical thought was a nice touch.
Sounds like deliberate mis-information by Intel. I can’t imagine this giant allowing positive hype to go to other companies rather than to itself. Perception is everything in this area. Look how Intel continues to foster the megahertz myth. They won’t be left out of the competition, and it will be perceived as such.
Dual Processors, 128-bit memory path (2Gb max) is NOT new! Why not 4, 8 or 32 parallel processors? It’s already here!
How about a chip with such a wish list as this…
– a short seven-stage pipeline (HALF the length & twice the speed of Intel’s)
– full 128-bit memory paths between L1 and L2 cache
– a floating-point unit that?s capable of executing double-precision mathematical calculations in a SINGLE processor cycle
– supports prefetching (which improves performance by retrieving and caching data before it?s actually demanded by the processor)
– up to four simultaneous 32-bit data streams.
– a vector processing unit
– parallel processing capabilities
– one dual processor system can execute up to 19 billion floating-point operations per second, or 19 gigaflops (Using the CPU clock speed is like measuring your car by its engine RPMs)
– 798 gigaflops of processing power in an industry standard rack
In addition…
– runs CURRENT off-the-shelf software
– inexpensive
– comes with FREE, UNIX-based, server OS w/ UNLIMITED users (NO ADDITIONAL Microsoft Server costs and user fees)
– free, easy-to-use yet powerful, Server management software
For more info, just visit http://www.apple.com/xserve/performance.html