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Intel Publishes "X86-S" Specification For 64-bit Only Architecture
Intel quietly released a new whitepaper and specification for their proposal on "X86-S" as a 64-bit only x86 architecture. If their plans workout, in the years ahead we could see a revised 64-bit only x86 architecture.
Entitled "Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture", Intel engineers lay the case for a 64-bit mode-only architecture. Intel is still said to be investigating the 64-bit mode-only architecture that they also refer to as "x86S". Intel is hoping to solicit industry feedback while they continue to explore a 64-bit mode only ISA.
[...] Under this proposal, those wanting to run legacy 32-bit operating systems would have to rely on virtualization. To further clarify, 32-bit x86 user-space software would continue to work on modern 64-bit operating systems with X86-S.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22, @12:23PM (13 children)
Just when the news was starting to look like Intel was snapping out of their malaise(?), along comes this, freezing them to 64 bit. They should be looking to the (distant?) future, proposing architecture for 128 bit computing!
Lots of previous systems have been poking at partial 128 bit architecture for decades, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/128-bit_computing [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 22, @12:41PM (2 children)
The advantage of a 128 bit data bus isn't the likely wider address bus but how cool it would be to move quad-precision floats in one move.
If you go 256 bit data bus that provides enough decimals of precision that 'lots' of float applications can be replaced by faster fixed point int. Some 256 bit GPUs did/do that.
512 bit data path would get you roughly 150 decimal fixed points of precision much faster than floating point. I remember later (or higher number LOL) GTX 200 series GPUs had 512 bit memory busses.
Its interesting as GPUs get wider, the smallest data bus in the average PC is probably the keyboard controller, but the second smallest is likely the main CPU.
Ironically given the topic of the story, Intel's AVX-512 extensions are one decade old this year, so if you had a mid 2010s Skylake Intel processor, you had a partially 512 bit CPU...
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday May 22, @01:23PM (1 child)
I am wondering about performance difference between fixed/floating. My understanding is that floating point is fully pipelined, i.e. there is a 1 IPC throughput. Is this correct? How many pipeline stages are there for floating point? How many for fixed?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 22, @04:06PM
The clock time is always faster for fixed, its just less complex than float.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday May 22, @01:05PM
They dropped AVX-512, though they didn't want to. I could have sworn I heard something about 1024...
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday May 22, @02:14PM (8 children)
There is nothing insightful in the parent.
Trivially, 128bit logic/arithmetic is common in current 64bit architectures already, as was in some historical machines, while true 128bit memory addressing is still thousands, if not millions of years of necessary technology advancement before us.
I am well aware I will need a bigger Universe just for holding such a computer.
Reality check: please note all current implementations of hardware memory addressing schemes are actually 48bit.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 22, @03:51PM (7 children)
Even if hardware memory addressing remains at 48 bits for the forseeable life of the universe, I can see many stupidly good reasons to have 128 bit addressing at all levels above the hardware memory addressing.
1. Be able to address every byte of available block storage (. . . be patient, I'll think of a reason why this might somehow be useful to someone somewhere in some obscure use case . . .)
2. Be able to inefficiently address every byte of memory in a cluster of PCs (something like beowulf, but much more gooder). That has to a be a lot better than plan 9 where everything on local network systems is addressable as a pathname as if it were local.
As the subject line sez, it may be 128 for the win, but we don't really need 128 bit addressing for Linux do we?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Monday May 22, @07:47PM (1 child)
We could give every dynamic library its own 64 bit address range and do away with dynamic address calculations. Calling a dynamic library function then would be no more complicated than calling a static one.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 22, @09:46PM
There sure would be a lot more space for address layout randomization.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday May 23, @07:32AM
3. Be able to run Java programs beyond "Hello World" at long last...
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 23, @01:39PM (3 children)
Well, I agree with the stupid part...
64 bit addressing already lets you address every individual byte of roughly 20,000,000 terabytes. I can't think of any reason any consumer hardware (or software) could possibly benefit from addressing that.
I mean, *maybe* that's not enough to address Google's entire data center storage archive.... but for anything else? What, you want to be able to address every byte of every computer on the planet? There's not even any rational way to map that onto a linear address space.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 23, @01:47PM (2 children)
Simple solution, obvious to any Java programmer. Use an even larger address space than 64 bit. Divide it into subsets where each subset has a different organization in how all of the intergalactic information is ordered.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 23, @01:53PM (1 child)
Hmm... nope. I'm not seeing how you got from "rational" to "Java Programmer". };-D
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 23, @03:30PM
Is there some path from 'rational' to 'Java programmer' ?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...