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As 64-Bit CPUs Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, and POWER aptly put it:

In a time when microprocessors are advertised on TV and CPU vendors have their own jingles, the fantastic technology embodied in these chips seems almost irrelevant. And it nearly is -- microprocessor marketing is drawing ever nearer to perfume advertising.

All the emphasis is on packaging and marketing, branding and pricing, channels and distribution, with little left over for solid product details, features, and benefits. Little old ladies who don't know a transistor from a tarantula know the name "Pentium" and think they want "HyperThreading." It's a good thing that for some of us, the technology still matters.

Also please don't be glamorized with the performance. Performance, which common folks associate with clock rate in MHz is a tricky thing to measure and to use and it's not all that matters in chips design.  Often price/performance ration is as important or more important. Moreover, ever for raw performance, benchmarks like SPECCPU are more relevant the clock speed. Please remember about so called "MHz myth". This is the battle that AMD used to fight in late 90th: they were spending big bucks trying to remind people that just because that P4 is running at 3GHz, it doesn't mean that it is faster than a 2.2GHz Athlon.

It's irrelevant how many times per second the chips clock says "tic-tac", what matters is how fast real chips can get real jobs done. For real-world purposes, you can compare the best (i.e., the fastest chips) or the most valuable (i.e., the ones with the best speed/price ratio).  To use a car metaphor (that most people seem to understand), not everyone needs or wants to drive a Lamborghini. It's expensive, it's hard to park, it's hard to drive, it's cramped and it drinks gas like there is no tomorrow. Most people are better off with a "normal" car, that's fast enough and powerful enough for them, is easy to drive, and has room for the kids and the dog.

There are several classic real architectures like System 3xx, SPARC, MIPS, VAX-11, PowerPC, Intel x86 and  Itanium. But real CPUs (other then MIPS) are always a little way to complex to study. Emulators of some  ideal "teaching" architectures makes a pleasant change from real system in the same way as miniOSes are a real pleasure to work with in comparison with systems with a gigabyte minimum memories requirements and kernels that no single human being can comprehend :-). Also CPU manufacturers always leaves some things out, but in an emulator you can try to correct their mistakes ;-).  There are also two important  "ideal" machines created by highly respected authors:


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[Jan 1, 2005] The year in microprocessors

64-bit Futures Part III - IBM and Sun

Well, Power architecture is increasingly going head-on against Itanium in many large deals, even sinking the good ship Itanic in some situations with - believe or not - lower prices! And improved performance with better compilers, more superdense high-bandwidth machine like the superb p655+, where two 8-way single MCM systems with 1.7+ GHz POWER4+ processors fit within a 4U space! So, 16 systems and some 880+ GFLOPs of peak 64-bit power get squeezed into a single rack - 4 times the density of HP Itanium2! Put a nice shared-memory interconnect like the increasingly popular Bristol product, Quadrics QsNet, and you got a nasty supercomputing monster.

And, these can run 64-bit Linux (almost) as well as their home OS, AIX.

The memory bandwidth of each eight-way box is 51.2 GB/s, or eight times that of a four-way Intel Itanium2, or 11 times that of a four-way Sun USIII box. Of course, Rmax (the obtainable percentage of FLOPS in Linpack FP bench) is right now far less on Power4 than on Itanium2 - 60% vs almost 90% - but the extra frequency and greater memory bandwidth more than make up for that in many apps.

Towards the end of the year, the multithreaded POWER5 will also dramatically improve the FP benchmark scores, not to mention twice the CPU density, a quarter larger cache, even higher memory bandwidth and lower latency. But don't expect major clock speed improvements, the focus was on real performance and reliability benefits - as if chip-kill memory, eLiza self-healing, and per-CPU logical partitioning was not enough...

Finally, the existing SuSE and coming RedHat Linux on POWER4 and its follow-ons, natively 64-bit of course, aim to give extra legitimacy to it being "an open platform" at least as much as Itanium is.

On the low-end, the PowerPC 970 - or POWER4 Lite, might (or pretty much will be now that Motorola G5 is down the drain) the basis of Apple's next generation Mac platform - it's 64-bit ticket to the future. With its low power - down to less than 16W in low-power mobile 1.2 GHz mode, it will also enable very dense server blades and of course POWERful 64-bit ThinkPads or PowerBooks running AIX, Linux or MacOS...

For IBM then, Opteron makes sense as an excellent tool to corner Intel, with POWER on high end and Opteron on low-end, both 64-bit and both soon manufactured by IBM Microelectronics? No, I didn't say both owned by IBM, even though that is a possibility: AMD does need a sugar daddy, not a sugar mommy. Got my hint who the feisty "sugar mommy" could be?

What about the other major vendor, from SUN-ny California? Well, UltraSPARCIIIi is finally out, no surprise there, it helps a bit but is still far behind all other major CPUs (except MIPS) in most benchmarks. Yes, Sun's mantra of something like "we don't care about speed, we focus on our brand etc" can continue, but what is computing if not about speed and performance?

Still no sign of US IV anyway, and even when it comes, don't expect much of extra per-thread performance over US III - When (and if) it really rolls out in volumes towards yearend, it will have to fight both POWER5 and Madison2, both very powerful beasts on the rise, backed by humungous ruthless megacompanies - each of which can eat Sun as an appetiser.

You can read hundreds of pages of Net discussions about the particular merits and demerits of SPARC vs other architectures, from all sides and viewpoints, but the fact remains - SPARC is the turtle of the 64-bit world, slow and maybe long-lived compared to, say, Alpha, but even turtles have to die at some point... and before they die, they become extremely slow...

64-bit Opteron is fast in some things compared to the rest of the gang, and not so fast in others, but whatever the case, current and future Opterons are vastly superior performance and feature wise to low-end and midrange SPARC offerings at umpteen times lower cost. Plus, they are as 64-bit as SPARC (or any other 64-bit CPU) is... so Sun taking Opteron would be simply common sense...

Why 64-bits are good, and why they're not

THIS ARTICLE hopes to cast some light on why 64-bit addressing, that is, the native mode of the Opteron or Itanium versus that of the Athlon or Pentium is important in 2003. It also attempts to address what the requirements are and - equally importantly - are not.

Before we start, an easy one. Why 64-bit and not 48-bit? Because it costs little more to extend a 32-bit ISA to 64-bit than to only 48-bit, and most people like powers of two. In practice, many of the hardware and operating system interfaces will be less than 64 bits, sometimes as few as 40 bits, but the application interfaces (i.e. the ones the programmers and users will see) will all be 64-bit.

There are several non-reasons quoted on the Internet; one is as arithmetic performance. 64-bit addressing does not change floating-point, and is associated with 64-bit integer arithmetic; while it is easy to implement 32-bit addressing with 64-bit arithmetic or vice versa, current designs don't. Obviously 64-bit makes arithmetic on large integers faster, but who cares? Well, the answer turns out to be anyone who uses RSA-style public key cryptography, such as SSH/SSL, and almost nobody else.

On closer inspection, such use is dominated by one operation (NxN->2N multiplication), and that is embedded in a very small number of places, usually specialist library functions. While moving from 32 to 64 bits does speed this up, it doesn't help any more than adding a special instruction to SSE2 would. Or any less, for that matter. So faster arithmetic is a nice bonus, but not a reason for the change.

File pointers are integers, so you can access only 4GB files with 32 bits, right? Wrong. File pointers are structures on many systems, and files of more than than 4GB have been supported for years on a good many 32-bit systems. Operations on file pointers are usually well localised and are normally just addition, subtraction and comparison anyway. Yes, going to 64-bits makes handling large files in some programs a bit easier, but it isn't critical.

Let's consider the most common argument against 64-bit: compatibility.

Almost all RISC/Unix systems support old 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems, as did IBM on MVS/ESA, and there is a lot of experience on how to do it almost painlessly for users and even programmers.

Microsoft has a slightly harder time because of its less clean interfaces, but it is a solved problem and has been for several decades.

Now let's get onto some better arguments for 64-bit. One is that more than 4GB of physical memory is needed to support many active, large processes and memory map many, large files - without paging the system to death. This is true, but it is not a good argument for 64-bit addressing. The technique that Intel and Microsoft call PAE (Physical Address Extension) allows 64 GB of physical memory but each process can address only 4GB. For most sites in 2003, 64GB is enough to be getting on with.

IBM used this technique in MVS, and it worked very well indeed for transaction servers, interactive workloads, databases, file servers and so on. Most memory mapped file interfaces have the concept of a window on the file that is mapped into the process's address space - PAE can reduce the cost of a window remapping from that of a disk transfer (milliseconds) to that of a simple system call (microseconds). So this is a rather weak reason for going to 64-bit addressing, though it is a good one for getting away from simple 32-bit.

Now, let's consider the second most common argument against 64-bit: efficiency. Doubling the space needed for pointers increases the cache size and bandwidth requirements, but misses the point that efficiency is nowadays limited far more by latency than bandwidth, and the latency is the same. Yes, there was a time when the extra space needed for 64-bit addresses was a major matter, but that time is past, except perhaps for embedded systems.

So 64-bit addressing is unnecessary but harmless except on supercomputers? Well, not quite. There are some good reasons, but they are not the ones usually quoted on the Internet or in marketing blurb.

The first requirement is for supporting shared memory applications (using, say, OpenMP or POSIX threads) on medium or large shared memory systems. For example, a Web or database server might run 256 threads on 16 CPUs and 32GB. This wouldn't be a problem if each thread had its own memory, but the whole point of the shared memory programming model is that every thread can access all of the program's global data. So each thread needs to be able to access, say, 16GB - which means that 32-bit is just not enough.

A more subtle point concerns memory layout. An application that needs 3GB of workspace might need it on the stack, on the main heap (data segment), in a shared memory segment or in memory set aside for I/O buffers. The problem is that the location of those various areas is often fixed when the program is loaded, so the user will have to specify them carefully in 32-bit systems to ensure that there is enough free space in the right segment for when the program needs its 3GB.

Unfortunately, this choice of where to put the data is often made by the compiler or library, and it is not always easy to find out what they do. Also, consider the problem of an administrator tuning a system for multiple programs with different characteristics. Perhaps worst is the case of a large application that works in phases, each of which may want 2GB in a different place, though it never needs more than 3 GB at any one time. 64-bit eliminates this problem.

To put the above into a commercial perspective, almost all general purpose computer vendors make most of their profit (as distinct from turnover) by selling servers and not workstations. 64-bit addressing has been critical for some users of large servers for several years now, and has been beneficial to most of them. In 2003, 64-bit is needed by some users of medium sized servers and useful to most; by 2005, that statement could be changed to say `small' instead of 'medium sized'. That is why all of the mainframe and RISC/Unix vendors moved to 64-bit addressing some time ago, and that is why Intel and AMD are following.

On the other hand, if you are interested primarily in ordinary, single user workstations, what does 64-bit addressing give you today? The answer is precious little. The needs of workstations have nothing to do with the matter, and the move to 64-bit is being driven by server requirements. µ

Nick Maclaren has extensive experience of computing platforms

Linux.com - Ultra DMA 66. See also

WWW Computer Architecture Home Page[July 7, 1999]


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*Configurable* Architecture pdf Kurt Keutzer Safari
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