P.A. Semi, a 150-employee chip startup, wants to make name for itself through attention to detail. The Silicon Valley chip startup, run by chip legend Dan Dobberpuhl-Dobberpuhl, its CEO, presided over the development of the Alpha processor while at Digital Equipment Corp. lifted its veil of secrecy Monday. The company will begin offering a new family of low-power, multicore, PowerPC architecture processors in 2006.
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Member since:2005-06-30
Only the BSD subsystem of OS X ships with 64-bit support. In order to have a graphical program utilize 64-bit addressing it needs to be broken into a 32-bit client (UI) and a 64-bit server (data processing) and use IPC to perform operations on its large data sets. The amount of 64-bit software that is used on the client is thus relatively small, leaving the performance of such things largely a matter of concern for server farms. That is unless you're genuinely concerned about the overall performance of Mathematica at operating on datasets >4GB.
That said the processors Intel will be shipping to Apple for inclusion (post-Merom) will support x86-64. The quality of that implementation is indeterminate at this point (or at least I know nothing about it), but it'll certainly be more than sufficient. Even Intel's current x86-64 offering is sufficient, even if inferior to AMD's.
Member since:2005-07-07
Nope, but I do care about accessing larger memory blocks than 4GB.
The quality of that implementation is indeterminate at this point (or at least I know nothing about it)
Based on the quality drop Intel makes in last years it is quite obvious.
Even Intel's current x86-64 offering is sufficient
It says all about you. For me? Compared to AMD? Intel is a piece of garbage whos only usefullness shows at winter (you don't need to spend so much on heating, Intel heats room for you. But maybe power bill is still too high to be counted as reducing costs) and the fact that it is much slower than AMD allows you to learn knitting on those winter nights.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-07
???
Intel's making some good headyway in solutions for laptops
???
Intel Centrino might be good, even I have to admit that. But OSX is 64-bit. And Intel sucks (in quality, speed and power consumption at 64-bit) there. For now, not even one decent 64-bit CPU came out of Intel, do not even think about laptop 64-bit Intel CPU.
So if they are not going back to 32-bit, Intel is the worst choice possible. AMD Turion on the other hand is 64-bit.