Blade Servers

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 11:49:16AM -0500, mike-DlQxw/23Tq2aMJb+Lgu22Q at public.gmane.org wrote:
> What makes you think em64t is a 32bit core?

The performance it shows in 64bit mode, and that intel kept telling
people that no one needed 64bit, and then suddenly had it.  Sure didn't
sound like time for a new design, just a patch of more extensions to the
addressing parts of the cpu.

Intel also only claims it is the same chip with 64bit addressing
extensions.  They don't claim it is a 64bit cpu.  it can allocate more
than 4GB ram to a single application, which may help some databases, but
it doesn't operate other 64bit things as fast as 32bit.  It also uses a
bounce buffer in hardware to do 64bit addressing to hardware addresses,
which adds a bit of latency, which the amd64 doesn't have or need.

> Um, I hope you mean AMD's integration of the northbridge on die, which
> happens to have an IOMMU.

Well having the memory controller certainly is part of making it run
faster.  Using hypertransport as the cpu to cpu link and cpu to other
chipset component link seems sensible.  The alpha based bus of the
athlon was nice, but hypertransport seems like an even better design
choice.

I personally never liked the P4 from the day I saw the first reviews of
it's design, it just seemed like a step backwards from the P3.  The
Pentium M on the other hand (which continues the P6 core from the PPro
and P2/P3 is much more impresive.  I hope some day it will actually
officially become a desktop CPU and the P4 can go where it belongs, and
hopefully intel will never let marketing design their CPUs again.

Lennart Sorensen
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