Strange, no one is mentioning Athlon 64 support, or Opteron, or anything AMD...

guess they will support the intel first i guess...

The Opteron/Athlon64 aren't on the market yet. When they are, they'll be supported.

Have you ever used Google? Enter "x86-64"+"windows" in Google an look at the first search result.

Yes, Who likes Itanium? I support Athlon-64 very much!
Please kick off those hyperthreading technology... we need real performance boost! AMD supports 64/32 bits application... really GREAT! MS, pls reveals and show us your Windows XP-64 for AMD!

Yes, Who likes Itanium? I support Athlon-64 very much!
Please kick off those hyperthreading technology... we need real performance boost! AMD supports 64/32 bits application... really GREAT! MS, pls reveals and show us your Windows XP-64 for AMD!

Woo, who acutally needs a 64bit CPU here, AMD or Intel? Nobody I guess.

Do you REALLY need to address more that 4Gig of memory on the dekstop.

64bit is a white elephant for desktops, there is no performance gains to be gotten, unless you want to access huge databases from big amounts of memory...

And a chairman of IBM once said that there'd never be a worldwide demand for more than...5 mainframes I think the number was...

There are people at *home* that could use this now. And, there are those that will use this in the future. "If you build it, they will come." As we move more towards multimedia driven applications and interfaces, as well as utilization of speach technologies, applications will become more and more bloated and require more and more hardware. After all, software bloats faster than hardware can keep up with it.

Utter crap.

People need faster CPU's, not CPU's that address huge amounts of memory..

That just not true. What about applications in the 3D medical industry? These data these applications work on are begining to become gigbytes in size. In order to visualize them fast, they need to be loaded in memory.

You mean .001% of users who use 3D medical applicaitons? I'm sure that these kind of applications may well need 64bit CPU's like Itanium or x86-64, but in the real world, very few users will se any benefit moving to the 64bit address space..

64bit, for the forseeable future, will be limited to high end servers and specific memory hungry applications (over 4Gb of mem), the rest of us will be firmly in the 32bit world, with faster CPU's appearing in 32bit variants.....

Mark Gillespie, your comments are as short-sighted as they come. You simply don't have a mature understanding of computing to make the comments you've just made above, and as a result you've discredited yourself in any future posts you make to this forum.

As a programmer and engineer, I await the widespread and sensible solution that AMD has presented to the market. Will it be any good? The proof will be in the pudding, but buying into the "we dont need 64-bit now" FUD that companies like Intel propagate [conveniently enough until they develop their own Desktop 64-bit CPU] is just well...remarkably naieve.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

-- Bill Gates, CEO and founder of Microsoft and world's wealthiest man, 1981

"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become
a practical proposition."

-- Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, 1962

"There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States."

-- T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, 1961
(the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965)

"Television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at
a plywood box every night."

-- Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946

For more quotes similar to Mark Gillespie's you can go to permanent.com

I see you actually give no reason as to why we DO need 64bit desktop CPU now?, merely quotes from the past.

All we get from a 64bit CPU, is insainly large numbers, and lots of memory address space. Neither of these are limiting factors on today's desktop PC's

So you're insinuating that the medical field is not the real world? How about engineering? You're right, these are not real world. I'm amazed that universities have been ripping off private citizens all of these years with degrees that promise a future in such fields, which are clearly the figment of someone's imagination!

Besides, nothing says "I win!" better in a pissing contest with your neighbor than a 64-bit processor!

"I see you actually give no reason as to why we DO need 64bit desktop CPU now?, merely quotes from the past."

I say we hang onto this quote as well.

Did it ever occur to you that you can't put the cart before the horse? How are you supposed to create and run applications that would require as much horsepower as a 64-bit processor if there were no such to handle it? You have to have the platform before you can build the application. Once it's created, the possibilities start sprouting.

Just look at the Cache, etc for the chip. Admitted, the link below is for Intel's chip, but AMD will surely compete if not surpass Intel. All around the chip is a nice advance in technology. You put down the quotes that were pasted, but you're being very much like the "No one will ever need more then 640k of RAM." Being able to address above 4GB of RAM is not the only advantage this CPU will give. I do agree that we won't see it on the home market for quite awhile, but I'm sure it will end up there as applications become more robust, etc.

http://www.intel.com/pro...r_proc+high1_080702&;

"I see you actually give no reason as to why we DO need 64bit desktop CPU now?, merely quotes from the past.

All we get from a 64bit CPU, is insainly large numbers, and lots of memory address space. Neither of these are limiting factors on today's desktop PC's "

You know what Mark, its not my job to do your homework for you. And it surely isnt my job to point out the painfully-obvious to anyone with any shred of insight [and foresight] into the world of computing. Do some independant research from a few well known sources.

In fact, I'll go back on what I just said and paste a quick link to an independant [and knowledgeable] source of information that may get you started off.

Here is a link to X86-64 computing and theory/applications via John Stokes of ars technica.

http://arstechnica.com/c...q1/x86-64/x86-64-1.html

After you've read that, feel free to discredit it all you want. The rest of us will be busy seeing the [potential] light.

There are two issues... do we need an address space larger the 4GB and do we need 64bit word-length.

On count one, yes; we need a larger address space. Even with hacks, like PAE, a true, flat 64bit address space is highly advantageous. Several groups of high-end users require (or will require in the near future) access to greater than 4GB of address space, specifically for engineers, content creation folks and, yes, high-end IT professionals who use hardware virtualization software like VMWare. PAE will hold the 32bit line for a while, but PAE is more work to code for and incurs more overhead (in terms of actually using the PAE API to access the memory from within a process) than simply having a big, flat, 16TB virtual address space.

On the second issue of needing 64bit word computing from a performance standpoint, I don't think so. We long ago passed the point where instruction sets and word-length were real determiners of computational performance. Yes, I think Itanium and VLIW/EPIC is conceptually cool (if over-engineered). Yes, I think AMD should get props for building a 64bit extension of the i386 architecture. No, I don't think 64bit word length will usher in a new era in raw-processing performance. Multiple machine states via hyperthreading and multi-core processors (on-chip SMP) along with big caches are far more effective at improving performance, especially from a qualitative standpoint.

So, in short, 64bit computing is not going to redefine performance as 16 bit and (to a lesser extent) 32bit processors did, however, we truly do need more address space and that will be the primary driver to 64bit platforms over the next 5 years or so.

-Mak