Intel strikes back with a parallel x86 design

On 24 Sep 2005 17:52:11 -0700, "Nathan Bates"
wrote:

Jim Brooks wrote:
Signs and portents as JMS would say.

Stevel Jobs does a 180' and enthusiastically becomes
Intel's bedfellow on the basis of a compelling roadmap.
That roadmap has to be pretty darned interesting.

Intel claims they aren't developing Hyperthreading anymore.
But Intel now knows all the issues involved in hw threading.
Why not exploit that know-how as an advantage over AMD?
AMD has only a fraction of the resources that Intel has,
so AMD will have a hard time catching up

I would hardly call the knowledge they gained in hyperthreading to be
knowledge that will come in handy later. Whatever they learned about HT
was only relevent to a Pentium 4, it can't apply to Pentium M.


That's like saying none of the knowledge gained from
the P6 design carried over to the Williamette design.

About the Mac, Jobs looked at the roadmaps of both Intel and AMD.

Hector was quoted as saying that Jobs/Apple never talked to AMD... and that
they were much too busy anyway.:-)

There were other factors, but Jobs was more intrigued by Intel's.
Why?

Hey maybe this is not a joke at all:
http://www.electric-chicken.co.uk/itoilet.html

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

"YKhan" writes:

EdG wrote:
That seems to be one of the biggest reasons why AMD is doing so well in
servers now. They have special ultra-low-power Opterons doing 30W for
this market.

you see the Sun/Opteron ads versus DELL... 50% faster, 66% more energy
efficient... http://www.sun.com/emrkt/rejected/index.html

And that's using overclocked CPUs too. It's still more power-efficient.

They're not "overclocked"; they're a special speed grade Sun asked for
and got.

Casper
--
Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

Joe Seigh wrote:
YKhan wrote:
Del Cecchi wrote:
doesn't ring any bells from comp.arch
Has only a few posts on groups.google.com search, my guess is
comp.sys.intel


Oh well, it just seems the comp.arch group produces an abundance of
dreamers. It's like a Beatnik Speakeasy for chip geeks. It's like the
technological equivalent of artsies. All of the "Alpha coulda ruled the
world types" seem to hang out there.


Looks to me like some of the regulars don't exactly know their hardware
basics either!

Along with the (transputer | iAPX-432 | TMS9900) coulda ruled the world
types. I only mention TMS9900 because even though it had memory mapped
registers, to a programmer it looked real good compared to the 8088 ISA.
You can substitute your favorite failed obscure processor there.



You probably know this but

If my memory serves me well, 2 of those were not failed, at least not
during their heyday they were quite successful selling in the millions
mark when a million actually meant something. One of them is alive and
well inside your settop box (that must mean many many millions at 70%
market share) but don't ask ST to name it, it hurts too much to say the
word.

The iapx432 being designed by a bunch of Phds with no clue about
hardware costs never reached the market AFAIR and the 8086 backup plan
went into effect. Eventually Intel must have forgot that lesson.

TI abandoned the 9900 as another of too many product lines and
eventually rationalized down to a DSP and mixed signal businesses.
Burning ones fingers in the commodity biz tends to make one refocus.

Inmos couldn't explain what seemed easy or obvious to the masses how to
compose processes, but CSP is still around.

BTW a modern Transputer wouldn't look anything like the old Transputer,
it might even run on x86 ISA or ARM or anything mainstream. Its just
boils down to an occam interpreter or compiler hosted on an otherwise
common hardware.

A specially designed processor to support pervasive communicating
processes with objects might look quite different though, but shades of
Niagara, Rekursiv etc.

johnjakson at usadt com
transputer2 at yahoo

In article .com,
"JJ" writes:
|
| You probably know this but
|
| If my memory serves me well, 2 of those were not failed, at least not
| during their heyday they were quite successful selling in the millions
| mark when a million actually meant something. One of them is alive and
| well inside your settop box (that must mean many many millions at 70%
| market share) but don't ask ST to name it, it hurts too much to say the
| word.

Yes. What the x86 fanatics miss is that there are a large number
of designs that could perfectly well have prevented its rise, or
toppled it from its perch and taken over during one of its more
vulnerable periods. Its success was always more a matter of luck
(and incompetence by the opposition) than merit.

In addition to those systems and the Alpha, there was the 68K
range and PowerPC, which both came VERY close to blocking the
rise of the x86 and toppling it, respectively. We know why they
didn't, too, and the reasons were not architectural.

Nowadays, with the patent system preventing innovation by new
companies and established companies not being prepared to tackle
new general-purpose architectures, I doubt that anything could
make headway until the x86 collapses of its own accord. Unless,
of course, that China says "sod you" to the USA over patents and
starts innovating itself.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Jim Brooks wrote:

AMD has only a fraction of the resources that Intel has,
so AMD will have a hard time catching up

Under the assumption that having more resources makes you faster. Another
Brooks (Fred) thought differently. There's a lower limit of a project to
finish, depending only on the number of people involved (not on the
inherent complexity - maybe an overstaffed team can complete before by
delivering a skunkwork project instead of the planned one). The complexity
only gets exposed when you have an understaffed team (and even then, half
the people doesn't mean twice the time).

Read in isolation, the comment makes as much sense as saying "these guys
from Kenia have only a tiny fraction of the resources all the first world
people have, they'll have a hard time to catch up on the New York city
marathon." If you look at the list
(http://www.mistupid.com/sports/nymarathon.htm), you'll see that since
1982, no US American won, and for the last decade, Kenia has five wins out
of ten.

To do a job in a short time, three things are necessary:

* Excellence (If you can't run, you can't win)

* The necessary resources (You can win the NYC marathon bare foot - it has
been done - but sneakers help)

* Knowing the direction (If you get lost on the way, you'll never win)

The last item may be least important for the NYC marathon, but it's most
important for chip development. And here, despite of the resources, Intel
is years behind AMD.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/

Nick Maclaren wrote:

Nowadays, with the patent system preventing innovation by new
companies and established companies not being prepared to tackle
new general-purpose architectures, I doubt that anything could
make headway until the x86 collapses of its own accord. Unless,
of course, that China says "sod you" to the USA over patents and
starts innovating itself.


Actually, if China is smart they won't say "sod you" but wait until
the US has made the world safe for IP and then do a swap of US debt
for US IP, the US having no other assets to sell at that point.

--
Joe Seigh

When you get lemons, you make lemonade.
When you get hardware, you make software.

In article ,
Joe Seigh writes:
| Nick Maclaren wrote:
|
| Nowadays, with the patent system preventing innovation by new
| companies and established companies not being prepared to tackle
| new general-purpose architectures, I doubt that anything could
| make headway until the x86 collapses of its own accord. Unless,
| of course, that China says "sod you" to the USA over patents and
| starts innovating itself.
|
| Actually, if China is smart they won't say "sod you" but wait until
| the US has made the world safe for IP and then do a swap of US debt
| for US IP, the US having no other assets to sell at that point

Speaking as an IP developer, I am unaware that the world is unsafe
for IP.

It is unclear how much IP is honestly owned by the USA, as many
of the claims are legally void and used primarily for extortion,
an obstruction to innovation or a defence against those.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Casper H.S. Dik wrote:
"YKhan" writes:
And that's using overclocked CPUs too. It's still more power-efficient.

They're not "overclocked"; they're a special speed grade Sun asked for
and got.

Casper

Yes, yes, we know, professionally "designed for extra speed" at the
factory by AMD so that Sun can win all benchmarks a few months ahead of
other people's Opteron boxes. Because in a few months AMD will have
those same speed grades available at 90W instead of 120W. :-)

Yousuf Khan

"JJ" writes:
The iapx432 being designed by a bunch of Phds with no clue about
hardware costs never reached the market AFAIR and the 8086 backup plan
went into effect. Eventually Intel must have forgot that lesson.

the last asilomar acm sigops (before they starting letting the
conference wander around, there was midnight session bemoaning that
the pennyless mit students always had to pay for coast-to-coast trip,
and it would only be fair if the berkeley students should sometimes
have to pay coast-to-coast fare for sigops conferences) ... there was
presentation on iapx432 effectively moving some number of operating
system features into silicon ... features that have had a somewhat
significant change rate ... and the requirement for change didn't stop
when the features were in silicon (but iapx432 silicon was lacking in
ability to make such changes).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Nick Maclaren wrote:
In article ,
Joe Seigh writes:
| Nick Maclaren wrote:
|
| Nowadays, with the patent system preventing innovation by new
| companies and established companies not being prepared to tackle
| new general-purpose architectures, I doubt that anything could
| make headway until the x86 collapses of its own accord. Unless,
| of course, that China says "sod you" to the USA over patents and
| starts innovating itself.
|
| Actually, if China is smart they won't say "sod you" but wait until
| the US has made the world safe for IP and then do a swap of US debt
| for US IP, the US having no other assets to sell at that point

Speaking as an IP developer, I am unaware that the world is unsafe
for IP.

It is unclear how much IP is honestly owned by the USA, as many
of the claims are legally void and used primarily for extortion,
an obstruction to innovation or a defence against those.



That's what I meant by "safe for IP".

--
Joe Seigh

When you get lemons, you make lemonade.
When you get hardware, you make software.