AMD "Hammer" to have 100 Million transistors!

Ummm...

...the Itanium 2 is already out, and the reason why the Athlon64/Opteron is so big is that it includes stuff that used to be in the northbridge chip. You can think of it as two chips in one (not two processors, two chips).

Re: AMD "Hammer" to have 100 Million transistors!

Originally posted by peter2002
The grand prize defintely goes to the upcoming Itanium 2. It will have 410 million transistors and will burn 130 watts. But the price will be crazy at over 4 grand. Ouch!

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Out of the whole X86 64-bit processor arena, I think that the AMD Clawhammer will have the upper hand with developers. The Itanium has a whole new instruction set created by Intel. While AMD has basically the same x86 instruction set. So porting to the Clawhammer will be easier than porting to an Itanium. So I guess in the end when Apple and the Wintel world have made the move to a 64-bit processors there will three kinds of instructions. PPC, (64-bit mod) X86, and the Itanium's instructions. That will make benchmarking a lot hard all around. Maybe then people will realize that speed wouldn't matter as MUCH as your chips ability to handle the instructions with easy and speed (not in GHz).

Re: Re: AMD "Hammer" to have 100 Million transistors!

Originally posted by al256


Out of the whole X86 64-bit processor arena, I think that the AMD Clawhammer will have the upper hand with developers. The Itanium has a whole new instruction set created by Intel. While AMD has basically the same x86 instruction set. So porting to the Clawhammer will be easier than porting to an Itanium. So I guess in the end when Apple and the Wintel world have made the move to a 64-bit processors there will three kinds of instructions. PPC, (64-bit mod) X86, and the Itanium's instructions. That will make benchmarking a lot hard all around. Maybe then people will realize that speed wouldn't matter as MUCH as your chips ability to handle the instructions with easy and speed (not in GHz).

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Porting to Clawhammer is a bit like porting from a G3 to a G4. You don't actually have to do ANY work, but if you do the work, it'll go faster.