Ubuntu Tablet Specs Leaked

Ok, but it's still the AMD64 architecture? I mean I know there is X86, which is 32-bit and gets its name from the Intel 386, 486 and so on processors. I know ARM is mobile. I didn't realize that 64-bit architecture is actually known as AMD64.

Dashrender

awww - I think the entire platform switched from X86 to AMD64 a while ago (at least for 64 bit things)

AMD's implementation must have been better than Intel's.

scottalanmiller

@thanksaj said:

Ok, but it's still the AMD64 architecture? I mean I know there is X86, which is 32-bit and gets its name from the Intel 386, 486 and so on processors. I know ARM is mobile. I didn't realize that 64-bit architecture is actually known as AMD64.

Your entire world is AMD64. x86 is a handle of the IA32 architecture. IA64 is Itanium. AMD64 is the one and only architecture on which Windows runs. The entire SMB marketplace has been exclusively on AMD64 for a decade.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

AMD's implementation must have been better than Intel's.

Intel's is IA64 (Itanium) and it is fading away. Intel thought that the x86 family was dead and abandoned it for Itanium. AMD thought that the CISC x86 world had a future and developed a 64bit architecture based on it. Intel wrote heavily about how crazy AMD was for doing this.

Within two years AMD dominated the market and ever since then, Intel has primarily made AMD clones rather than the previous two decades in which AMD had been making Intel IA32 clones.

Any reference to x86_64 is an attempt but Intel marketing to make people forget that Intel had said that AMD64 was a bad idea and try to get people to forget that the modern PC architecture is one defined by AMD, not by Intel.

thanksajdotcom

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

AMD's implementation must have been better than Intel's.

Intel's is IA64 (Itanium) and it is fading away. Intel thought that the x86 family was dead and abandoned it for Itanium. AMD thought that the CISC x86 world had a future and developed a 64bit architecture based on it. Intel wrote heavily about how crazy AMD was for doing this.

Within two years AMD dominated the market and ever since then, Intel has primarily made AMD clones rather than the previous two decades in which AMD had been making Intel IA32 clones.

Any reference to x86_64 is an attempt but Intel marketing to make people forget that Intel had said that AMD64 was a bad idea and try to get people to forget that the modern PC architecture is one defined by AMD, not by Intel.

Ok, that clears it up. I've heard of Itanium and seen IA64 before but you don't hear very much about Itanium. So you say Intel has been copying AMD. Why is it that AMD seems so far behind the curve in terms of comparable products then?

scottalanmiller

@thanksaj said:

Ok, that clears it up. I've heard of Itanium and seen IA64 before but you don't hear very much about Itanium. So you say Intel has been copying AMD. Why is it that AMD seems so far behind the curve in terms of comparable products then?

AMD was ahead at the end of the IA32 era and led the AMD64 era in performance for many years. You are just too young. Opteron was the dominant server processor for a few generations.

That AMD designed the architecture, or that Intel designed the previous one, really has little to nothing to do with who makes the better processor based on that architecture. ARM designs both the Aarm32 and the Aarm64 architectures, but they don't build any processors at all. Other people do. So ARM, by definition, never leads in their own field. Oracle designs the Sparc architecture, but Fujitsu makes the best Sparc processors (for most use cases.)

scottalanmiller

@thanksaj said:

Ok, that clears it up. I've heard of Itanium and seen IA64 before but you don't hear very much about Itanium.

Only major maker of IA64 gear is HP. The HP Integrity and HP SuperDome systems are pure Itanium. NTG has one.

thanksajdotcom

@scottalanmiller said:

@thanksaj said:

Ok, that clears it up. I've heard of Itanium and seen IA64 before but you don't hear very much about Itanium.

Only major maker of IA64 gear is HP. The HP Integrity and HP SuperDome systems are pure Itanium. NTG has one.

I knew that Itanium was an HP thing. Cool that NTG has one.

scottalanmiller

@thanksaj said:

I knew that Itanium was an HP thing. Cool that NTG has one.

Integrity is an HP thing. Itanium is an Intel thing.

Itanium did so poorly and cost so much to design that it is infamously known as the Itanic.

coliver

@scottalanmiller said:

@thanksaj said:

I knew that Itanium was an HP thing. Cool that NTG has one.

Integrity is an HP thing. Itanium is an Intel thing.

Itanium did so poorly and cost so much to design that it is infamously known as the Itanic.

Was it architecturally better? Or is that something because it was so unpopular we would never know? It would be a shame if they invested all that money and didn't learn a way to manufacture a better chip from it.

scottalanmiller

@coliver said:

Was it architecturally better? Or is that something because it was so unpopular we would never know? It would be a shame if they invested all that money and didn't learn a way to manufacture a better chip from it.

It was an EPIC design, the first of its kind. Cost so much to make that no one could afford one and it wasn't backwards compatible with IA32 so it left the old software stranded. So no one upgraded. AMD64 was much slower but much more useful and had things like... operating systems available for it. Itanium had to be designed for from scratch. Only HP-UX and VMS ever became mainstays on it - but they killed off the Alpha and PA-RISC systems to do it, both of which were better. So it was an uber failure there as well.

In the end, the EPIC design failed and it ended up not being able to outperform Power and Sparc so languished as just "another" high end processor but one with very little support. And with the market scale of AMD64, it caught up and now does 90% of the performance at 10% of the price.

For a little while, Microsoft invested in Itanium and if Server 2012 R2 was available it, Windows on SuperDome is crazy awesome. But since Microsoft declared it to not have value, it really ended up not having value.

It's not a bad processor, but at no point was it good enough to matter.

Reid Cooper

Itanium was, and really still is, a pretty solid system. Incredibly per thread performance and massive cache. You can run Windows on them with zero memory - because the entire OS can operate out of cache! It is really just the price and lack of available operating systems that got them. If the chips were only twice the price of a top end Xeon or Operton and if Linux was broadly available on it, even from just a single major vendor, it would make a huge difference.