64bit prescotts or Not

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BlckRaven

Limp Gawd
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64bit prescotts or Not ?

I love the fact that you guys are reviewing and giving out cool opinions on these new chips. I have yet to see one reviewer confirm this. do the new chips have x64 xtentions.

AMD is looking better and better in my eyes.
 
come idf in a few weeks intel says they'll demo the technology (in xeon cores). but my best guess is that this is only a proof of concept type of thing. chances are the extensions are there, just not enabled, the same way they did it with hyperthreading.
 
All along the major input has been that the Yamhill version of x86-64 architecture would be in Prescott but disabled. Intel confirmed that it would be announcing the Yamhill project at their next press conference or whatever it is that they have lol. The time of 64-bit computing on desktops is not here yet fella's whether AMD has a chip out that can or not. Best just wait and see how the chips fall cause going out to buy an A64 cause it has 64-bit extensions is not a good reason. Buying it cause its the best gaming processor is. It will take at least a year or more for the software to start coming out in 64-bit versions. I dont think most games will adopt 64-bit for a while. I know there are a couple that are but Microsoft has not set a release date for Windows XP 64-bit and they have publicly said they wont release it as a retail product in stores (at least according to the information i have gathered on Windows XP 64-bit from other sites). So the future of 64-bit this year is uncertain. What is certain is that whether you buy a Pentium 4 or an A64 your not going to get left in the dust by ither one and the prices of the Northwood cores now are a total steal with the 2.8Ghz Northwood having the best price/performance ratio on the market right now.
 
Originally posted by burningrave101
All along the major input has been that the Yamhill version of x86-64 architecture would be in Prescott but disabled. Intel confirmed that it would be announcing the Yamhill project at their next press conference or whatever it is that they have lol. The time of 64-bit computing on desktops is not here yet fella's whether AMD has a chip out that can or not. Best just wait and see how the chips fall cause going out to buy an A64 cause it has 64-bit extensions is not a good reason. Buying it cause its the best gaming processor is. It will take at least a year or more for the software to start coming out in 64-bit versions. I dont think most games will adopt 64-bit for a while. I know there are a couple that are but Microsoft has not set a release date for Windows XP 64-bit and they have publicly said they wont release it as a retail product in stores (at least according to the information i have gathered on Windows XP 64-bit from other sites). So the future of 64-bit this year is uncertain. What is certain is that whether you buy a Pentium 4 or an A64 your not going to get left in the dust by ither one and the prices of the Northwood cores now are a total steal with the 2.8Ghz Northwood having the best price/performance ratio on the market right now.
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Most of your information is just plain wrong. Many analysts are questioning whether the Prescott will have 64 but extensions, at all, or if it will come out with the Tejas core or later. You certainly can't count on it eventually becoming available if you buy a Prescott now. The Windows 64 beta is already available, and the product is DEFINATELY going to be comercially released. The current projected date is in the 3rd quarter of this year. Unreal Tournament 2003 is going to have 64 bit support upon release of Windows with 64 bit support. The key performance advance with the AMD 64 bit extensions is not necessarily the 64 bit aspect, but the doubling of registers leading to performance benefits. Since Unreal Tournament tends to be an engine other games are based on, this means a significant number of other games will have 64 bit support and a corresponding performance advantage soon. Since you just have to recompile your code, its fairly easy for software to be recompiled to take advantage of the extra registers and get the corresponding performance advantage. I can start listing some of the products that have already announced their intention of offer 64 bit support if this is requested. At the very least, the AMD's instruction set support is something you need to consider if you intend to keep the chip at least 6 months or more.
 
I can't remember, so here's a question...
when was HT announced for the P4?
It was announced with the Northwood as a future feature, right?
 
Originally posted by 0ldman
I can't remember, so here's a question...
when was HT announced for the P4?
It was announced with the Northwood as a future feature, right?
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure. It was on the chip but disabled for quite awhile until they decided to activate it for the P4 3.06gHz Northwood-B.

Aegion, I think you mean UT2k4. Epic Games is a big fan of AMD, as you can tell from the AMD Athlon XP logo on the box of UT2k3.
 
Originally posted by DaveX

Aegion, I think you mean UT2k4. Epic Games is a big fan of AMD, as you can tell from the AMD Athlon XP logo on the box of UT2k3.
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Nope, I mean UT@k3. The support is being provided with a patch. Tim Sweeney has even talked about requiring 64 bit support to run future editors for forthcoming games. The game support is pretty much waiting for Windows with 64 bit support to be released.
LAS VEGAS -- November 20, 2002 --At Comdex, AMD (NYSE:AMD) today demonstrated a 64-bit developmental version of Unreal Tournament 2003 from Epic Games on a system based on the upcoming AMD Athlon™ 64 processor. The technology demonstration illustrates AMD’s commitment to bringing next-generation, 64-bit computing to the desktop and consumer applications.
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http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/news/press_releases/article/1562/

Here's Tim Sweeney talking in an interview about the advantages of AMD's 64 bit instruction set.
FiringSquad: Can you describe the process involved in migrating to AMD's 64-bit architecture? Has the transition been a difficult one?

Since our code is pure C++ and already ran on 32-bit Windows and Linux, the only work required was to make the code 64-bit safe. No Hammer-specific work was necessary to get the port up and running; what we did for Hammer is the same thing that would be needed to run on 64-bit PowerPC or 64-bit Itanium.

In the case of the Unreal codebase, about 99.9% of the code was already 64-bit safe and didn't need touching. Of course, with a million-line codebase, the remaining 0.1% left a hundred or so places in the code that needed updating because of assumptions we made years ago before we'd thought about 64-bit. It was a relatively straightforward process, and took Ryan Gordon about 10 days of hard work.

FiringSquad: Will you be adding any special features to 64-bit Unreal Tournament 2003 in particular?

No. Our goal in porting UT2003 to 64-bit was to show that it can be done without much work, that the platform is stable, and that it's ready for gaming. We're not doing anything that really takes advantage of over 4 gigs of RAM or the large virtual address space.

The next generation of the Unreal engine is where we'll be taking major advantage of 64-bit in a very visible way, in the 2005 timeframe. We expect to support 32-bit and 64-bit clients and servers for gameplay, but might require 64-bit for content creation, because of the significant requirements of our new content development tools.

Because of our new content tools, we're already feeling a very strong need for 64-bit internally right now, and by year's end I expect we'll look at 64-bit as something that we couldn't possibly do our jobs without. We expect this sentiment to carry over to other game developers in the next 12 months, to high-end consumers over the next 24 months, and the wide mainstream all the way down to the lowest end of the market within 36 months.

FiringSquad: What kind of performance benefits are you seeing with the 64-bit codebase and AMD's 64-bit processor in general? Are there any additional advantages to 64-bit?

The extra registers can give you a significant performance gain in loops which currently have to spill over into memory. The on-die memory controller reduces the path for uncached reads significantly, which is a huge win for applications like Unreal which are memory-limited. On the other hand, pointers grow from 4 bytes to 8, so traversal of linked data structures takes an additional bandwidth hit. I think you'll probably see a clock-for-clock improvement over Athlon XP of around 30% in applications like Unreal that do a significant amount of varied computational work over a large dataset.

FiringSquad: You've said in the past that: "On a daily basis we're running into the Windows 2GB barrier with our next-generation content development and preprocessing tools." How important a role has the additional memory capacity played in your development efforts and can you provide any specific examples?

In Unreal Tournament 2003, we built 2000-polygon meshes, texture map them, and use them in-game with diffuse lighting. That was a simple process, which didn't require any memory beyond that taken up by the mesh and texture maps.

In our next-generation technology, we are building 2,000,000-polygon meshes, and running them through a preprocessing program that analyzes the geometry and self-shadowing potential of the mesh based on thousands of incident lighting direction using per-pixel floating point math, and compresses all of this data down to texture maps, bump maps, and 16-component spherical harmonic maps at as high a resolution as possible.

This process uses many gigabytes of memory, and implementing it on 32-bit CPU's places a lot of constraints on the size of meshes we can preprocess and the resolution of maps we can generate. With onerous programmer gymnastics, this kind of algorithm could be made disk-based or Address Windowing Extensions aware, but these approaches require an order of magnitude more development effort, and aren't practical given the frequency with which we change and improve our algorithms.

So, overall, we've found 32-bit adequate for prototyping new content, but for serious development will only be possible with 64-bit...

FiringSquad: How important a role will the 64-bit instructions play in your next generation engine? Will you be adding exclusive features for 64-bit users?

There's a good chance 64-bit will likely be mandatory for content development. Since we release the Unreal level editor and scripting framework to users, this affects gamers and not just us internally.

For playing the game, we'll support both 32-bit and 64-bit. Depending on how much content we end up with, there's a good chance that we'll expose high-detail modes that will require 64-bit, giving you higher texture detail, for example. But there won't be any divergence in the gameplay itself.
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http://www.firingsquad.com/features/sweeney_interview/default.asp
 
Originally posted by DaveX
What would be the use when UT2k4 is due out soon...
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Obviously UT2K4 will have it too. The Linux 64 bit support for AMD-64 chips exists right now for UT2K3. Originally the assumption was Microsoft would have Windows with 64 bit support out much earlier.
 
Here you guys are arguing that 64-bit is going to "revolutionize" gaming...it won't.

Why? Because the LIMITING FACTOR of the majority of the newer games WILL be the video cards. I doubt you'd see a *real* noticable diffrence by switching to 64 bit vs getting a top of the line videocard.

When it comes to raw cpu performance (like compression and encoding) intel in 32-bit mode KICKS amd IN 64 bit mode.

Don't say the "software" support is there. All I see is ONE game UT2K3/2K4 and they won't have any benificial improvements b/c the bottlenecks ARE the videocards and not cpus.

Then there's divx 5.1.1...but I've already proven that Intel still kicks AMD's butt when using divx 5.1.1 (with amd in 64-bit mode)

Honestly it's up to you. By the time there is *real* support for the x86-64 (ie everything perfected, everything stable and good), the Athlon FX-51 will look like a bargin basement chip, compared to what will be out there, so you'll end up upgrading again anyhow. So I don't think it's worth getting an A64, not right now anyways (if you're like me you upgrade the cpu-mobo once every 1.5 years or so)
 
Prescott *may* already be a 64-bit core, but we probably can't use it because of the Socket 478 limitations.

It will be interesting to see if the LGA 775 is a 64-bit platform. Not that it would run that much faster than a 32-bit platform, but it would let people go above 4GB of memory.

Or, it could just be a 2x32bit core, which I would greatly prefer as it would speed up all current applications without needing to upgrade to XP-64 and 64-bit applications (like Office 64?)

Or it could all just be fud.
 
Office 32 runs just fine in 32bit mode. There is no need to have office 64. Doom 3 64 and Need For Speed 64 is another matter all together.
 
first of all, 64 gaming will be fine. that is if the vid cards keep up.
No longer will they be limited.

as far as apps. Well i can think of a few that will benifit.

3dsmax, After effects, Photoshop. Any app that requires high FPU and demand ram.

They will all have to be recompiled or patched to take advantage of 64bit.

Makes me wonder why we have not seen any patches for AMD 64


I know Intel has something in the works. ( i hope they do)
but the thought of it alone for now is pure marketing to spoil AMD sales. Everyone is taking a wait and see attitude.

I would love a dual cpu box now. but i want dual 64bit cpus. hehehe
for vid editing, 3d rendering. no apple does not satisfy me.. hehehe :D
 
One application where 64-bits made a huge, huge difference was 'gzip'. Scores nearly increased by 40% simply by compiling for AMD64. I would expect that many other compression apps will benefit as well.
 
Originally posted by BlckRaven
first of all, 64 gaming will be fine. that is if the vid cards keep up.
No longer will they be limited.

as far as apps. Well i can think of a few that will benifit.

3dsmax, After effects, Photoshop. Any app that requires high FPU and demand ram.

They will all have to be recompiled or patched to take advantage of 64bit.

Makes me wonder why we have not seen any patches for AMD 64


I know Intel has something in the works. ( i hope they do)
but the thought of it alone for now is pure marketing to spoil AMD sales. Everyone is taking a wait and see attitude.

I would love a dual cpu box now. but i want dual 64bit cpus. hehehe
for vid editing, 3d rendering. no apple does not satisfy me.. hehehe :D
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a few companies have not expressed interest in 64bit, such as Alias|Wavefront (funny, cause their parent company, SGI, is all over 64bit), Adobe, and Macromedia...
 
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