Interesting read about upcoming K9 processors

You seem to have a bit of an odd view of backward compatibility.

I do. Have you seen the talk in question, and understood the situation
Colwell described?

Jan

I artiklen , "Dean Kent"
skrev:

"Dean Kent" wrote in message
.. .

Is it possible that Mike was wrong, or perhaps his source?

Check this link to MDR. This is the 2nd half 2000 Intel forecast. That
means it was likely compiled in the first half, or perhaps even late 1999.
It shows Northwood as a P4 part, not IA-64. Can we presume that Mike or
his source were out in left field?

64 bit uops did show up in Prescott and according to Andy Glew, IA-64
support was proposed for Tejas (but turned down). Even if rumors have a
basis in fact, it is common for planned features to creep a generation or
two upstream (versus reality). Makes for much better drama.

--
Mvh./Regards, Niels Jørgen Kruse, Vanløse, Denmark

On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 04:22:13 GMT, "Dean Kent"
wrote:

The charts I saw were Itanic to exceed x86 sales by 2003 and by '05 x86
was relegated to the dust-bin of embedded losers. ...and that was in
1997ish. There was some discussion about this in AFC a few weeks ago (I'm
not the only one remembering such).

I saw charts in 1997 also - and none of them showed Itanium moving out of
the high end server segment. Though I was only given reseller roadmaps
directly, I was given OEM roadmaps from a motherboard maker associated with
a very, very large Asian OEM. I don't recall seeing any of those things -
and I still have those roadmaps. I wonder if anyone 'recalling' such things
does?

As for George's argument, as usual it is a fallacy. It is called
"argumentum ad ignorantium". Just because it cannot be proven to be false,
does not mean that it is true. The burden of proof is upon those trying to
make the claim. Public information says Intel did not intend to replace
x86 anytime soon, so it will take a bit more than 'recollections' to make
the case that they did. Sorry.

As usual the Kentster's way of impolitely calling someone a liar... and not
only me. The roadmaps *did* exist! Were they official roadmaps like those
issued to the i-Stooges in your quixotic, privileged position?... nope!
Were they published in magazines and Web sites?... yup! The evidence has
vanished along with bubble memory cheers and i860 effervescence - seems
like you were not paying attention.

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

Yousuf Khan wrote:

http://www.memory-key.com/ResearchRe...versky2000.htm

This article from late 1998, it was thought that the IA-32 line of
processors would end in 2003 with the Foster, and from that point afterwards
IA-64 would take over starting with Deerfield. It's also interesting to note
that back then, Intel thought 64-bit for the masses would take off starting
in 2003. It turned out that they were absolutely right, but it just wasn't
one of their chips, it was the Athlon 64 and Opteron.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10...ield_to_split/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10...ter_to_extend/

Now, it's obvious that Intel's plans didn't actually live upto its original
roadmaps. That's not surprising or unexpected. However, it's also not
important, it was their intention that is being discussed here only. It was
obvious that in 1998, Intel was hinting at replacing IA-32 at least by 2003.

Yousuf Khan


For those of you who seem to enjoy beating a dead horse in you K9
thread, take a look at the links above!

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
t.cable.rogers.com...

No one said anything about desktop or server x86, we were just talking
about
x86 in general.

Actually, neither of these articles made any mention about these being
Xeon
parts. Yes, Foster eventually did turn out to be a P4 Xeon, but at that
time
it wasn't known what market it was aimed at. It was just a name on a
roadmap.

Now you *are* being disingenuous. It was very well known that Foster was a
Xeon at the time. I *have* the roadmaps, and the roadmaps very clearly
segment the market. Foster was at the lower end of the server segment by
2003 (which was supposed to be why Deerfield would be the low-end
replacement).


However, the 32-bit Intel roadmaps ended at Foster at that time, while at
the same time a lot of names appeared on the IA-64 roadmap well after
Foster. Why so little visibility on IA-32 roadmap when IA-64 was so
visible?

Yousef - this is a *SERVER* roadmap. Period. Not an IA-32 roadmap.


What would you call them, boutique chips? Athlon 64 with a small
marketshare
in the desktop space could still mean millions of chips in a year. And of
course, Opteron at 6-7% would still mean that it outsells all non-x86
server
chips. And of course none of this is static, as both of those processors
increasing their marketshare not decreasing.

Itanium outsold Opteron last year (100K to about 70K, I believe). So, if
Opteron is a mass-market 64-bit CPU, what is Itanium? Your comments apply
to Itanium as well as Opteron, and yet you relegate Itanium to the scrap
heap? Disingenuous does not seem to describe properly the argument being
presented, it seems.

I believe that by this time the point should have been made, and recognized.
I doubt most care much about this particular point anymore, however.

Regards,
Dean


Yousuf Khan

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
t.cable.rogers.com...
Keith wrote:
On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:33:24 -0400, George Macdonald wrote:
Uhh, it's called spin.:-) The fact you or I can't find the
docs/pages to confirm the "recollections" does not mean they did not
exist. Nefarious is your term but I did see a roadmap which showed
x86 relegated to mostly STBs by 2005... after a steady year by year
decline in PCs.

The charts I saw were Itanic to exceed x86 sales by 2003 and by '05
x86 was relegated to the dust-bin of embedded losers. ...and that was
in 1997ish. There was some discussion about this in AFC a few weeks
ago (I'm not the only one remembering such).

I think a lot of us can remember Intel's predictions about IA64 eventually
replacing IA32 by some point in time. You don't need some archival webpage
in order to prove it. Just the fact that so many of us who have been in
this
business for so long can recall these statements is more than enough.


I'm sure most or even all of us remember these things.

Some of the problem is in semantics: introduction, general
availability, wide use, replacement. I take "replacing" to
mean that IA32 is no longer available, and IA64 is used
in all cases including embeded devices.

My particular memory puts the date of IA64 replacing
IA32 well into the second decade of this century.

My memory puts the date of widespread use of
IA64 in the first decade of this century.

This is from an investment viewpoint: what I thought
Intel was saying about the evolution of the portions
of their product line that produced the most profit.

But the fact that I think these things is probably rather
uninteresting, since I cannot produce any actual
documents that say the specific things I think will be true ;-)

--

... Hank

http://horedson.home.att.net
http://w0rli.home.att.net

In comp.sys.intel Ketil Malde wrote:
(Nick Maclaren) writes:

Ketil Malde writes:

I think most of HP's IA64 sales also are going to the scientific
computing segment.

I've wondered about this; if true, I think it's a combination of
several factors:
- the fact that SPEC is now an in-cache benchmark.
- 4 flops/cycle on linpack - good scores for top500.
- before Xeon/Opteron shipped with 128b ddr, it2 had the only
6.4 GB/s memory system.
- big discounts from vendors.
- some people swallowing spin about the next-big-thing.

I guess I should emphasize that I'm just guessing - I know about a few
Superdomes that do number crunching (which anyway is what IA64 is good
at). Are there any numbers; anywhere?

I've done some testing, and Superdomes are OK - comparable to Altix,
not surprisingly.

the ironic thing is that ia64 owes nearly all of its good performance to
running benchmarks in-cache. out of cache, it's dramatically less
impressive. I re-analyzed a batch of specFP results, by sorting the
individual components by score. you'll immediately notice that ia64
has some real outliers, which just happen to be the smallest (RSS) SPEC
components, that just happen to be in-cache on ia64, and not on most
other processors. iirc, if you drop the top 4, Opterons are actually
faster than ia64.

there are realistic codes which have small working sets. the real problem
is that these codes tend to run pretty well on a 3GHz Xeon, so why pay
incredible prices for a 1.3 GHz It2? for memory-intensive codes, the
standard is pretty much Opteron.

regards, mark hahn.
--
operator may differ from spokesperson.
http://hahn.mcmaster.ca/~hahn

Dean Kent wrote:
Now you *are* being disingenuous. It was very well known that Foster
was a Xeon at the time. I *have* the roadmaps, and the roadmaps very
clearly segment the market. Foster was at the lower end of the
server segment by 2003 (which was supposed to be why Deerfield would
be the low-end replacement).

And as it has been said, it doesn't matter, we're just talking about x86 in
general. The x86 roadmap's visibility ended at Foster in one case, and
Northwood in another. I'm not going to get into a ****ing contest with you
Dean (I'll let Keith do that :-), but you asked for reasons why the beliefs
are so widespread, so now you know.

Itanium outsold Opteron last year (100K to about 70K, I believe).
So, if Opteron is a mass-market 64-bit CPU, what is Itanium? Your
comments apply to Itanium as well as Opteron, and yet you relegate
Itanium to the scrap heap? Disingenuous does not seem to describe
properly the argument being presented, it seems.

Quite the accomplishment for Itanium too, that was. It beat the sales of a
chip that came out for the first time ever four months into the year. This
year Opteron is already slated to sell 100,000 in one quarter, let alone the
whole year. Quite the wide-selling boutique chip isn't it?

I believe that by this time the point should have been made, and
recognized. I doubt most care much about this particular point
anymore, however.

Oh that point was already reached a long time ago, you were the only one
denying what the rest of us saw as quite obvious. This is just the education
of Dean Kent at this point.

Yousuf Khan

George Macdonald wrote:
On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 04:22:13 GMT, "Dean Kent"
As for George's argument, as usual it is a fallacy. It is called
"argumentum ad ignorantium". Just because it cannot be proven to
be false, does not mean that it is true. The burden of proof is
upon those trying to make the claim. Public information says Intel
did not intend to replace x86 anytime soon, so it will take a bit
more than 'recollections' to make the case that they did. Sorry.

As usual the Kentster's way of impolitely calling someone a liar...
and not only me. The roadmaps *did* exist! Were they official
roadmaps like those issued to the i-Stooges in your quixotic,
privileged position?... nope!
Were they published in magazines and Web sites?... yup! The evidence
has vanished along with bubble memory cheers and i860 effervescence -
seems
like you were not paying attention.

We've now even dug up some old historical webpages (possibly written in
parchment or papyrus or something) from the early days of the commercial
Internet which states exactly why we thought Intel's plans were to go
towards IA-64. Yet, he still needs to argue. Some people are just beyond
quixotic!

Yousuf Khan

Patrick Schaaf wrote:
Would it be plausible that initially, Hyperthreading (two threads) was
invented so one IA-32 and one IA-64 process could share the processor
at the same time, different decoders feeding the same trace cache and
execution resources?

It's possible but we have no way of knowing that right now. Anyways, that
would sound more like dual-processing than Hyperthreading.

Yousuf Khan