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.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
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:2005-06-30
You can care all you want about 64-bit computing. You're in the overwhelming minority.
> Based on the quality drop Intel makes in last years
> it is quite obvious.
This is perhaps the stupidest reasoning ever. Do you remember the K7 (pre-Barton) with its ludicrous power requirements? Do you remember the "burn up your AMD" video? I'm sorry, did this keep AMD from making an excellent architecture in Hammer? No, I don't think it did. Apparently you conflate engineering with the performance history of your favorite sports team.
> It says all about you. For me? Compared to AMD? Intel
> is a piece of garbage
Well then you are incapable of a modicum of perspective. Not only are you ignoring that the performance differential is minor (and goes in both directions for different operations) but you rely exclusively on power consumption (which before the K8 and Intel ran into the same wall everyone else did while clocking-up NetBurst, AMD was the defacto loser in, and remains so in the mobile platform) which Intel will remedy completely with its next architecture (which will be what's in Apple's computers) leaving you jack shit to rationalize your position with.
In terms of x86 purchases, other than for my laptop and a few other things, I've purchased AMD products almost exclusively for my own personal use for about...nine years. They've offered a better cost/performance ratio, but they've definitely had several hits and misses in technology. Both in performance and power consumption, so you can just save your hypocritical power consumption comments for someone with no recollection of anything more than three years ago.
Member since:2005-07-06
Its obvious that you paid no attention to the IDF orgy that happened a few months ago; P4 is a dead end; they're going back to the drawing board and basing their whole line up on a single core that scales from desktop to server, from laptop to workstation - they're recycling the Centrino core, adding features, scaling it down and doing everything possible to make it the most efficient wattage to performance ratio on the market.
How about instead of bashing Intel, lets wait till next year when Yonah and others are release.
Member since:2005-07-06
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)
My experience has been the opposite, albeit with disparate generations of hardware. I have both a dual 1Ghz P3 system and an AthlonXP 2800, and the P3 system runs cooler and quieter than the AMD box.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-06-30
To be precise libsystem and accelerate are the only 64-bit system libraries shipped. There is no support for 64-bit Objective-C programs, and none of the other frameworks ship as anything other than 32-bit libraries. Having any 64-bit support at all without kernel support would be most impressive.
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.