Comdex 2002 Wrapup - AMD, NVIDIA & Transmeta

AMD's 64-bit Push

One area AMD was possibly too optimistic on was what 64-bit memory addressability would bring to the desktop. Promises of bigger, more intelligent, photorealistic games for example are honestly not going to be made possible by the move to 64-bit. But AMD insists that 64-bit does more for the desktop than Hyper-Threading; maybe that's just AMD-PR talking but it's still too far fetched for us to swallow.

AMD did have the new 64-bit port of the latest Unreal engine up and running at their suite. From talking to Epic it was clear that they had intentions of supporting x86-64 from the start and like almost everybody, are simply waiting for AMD to release the CPUs. Epic has said that they will ship a 64-bit version of Unreal Tournament 2003 when Athlon 64 makes it to retail, and the performance increase from moving to Opteron is significant. You get a 15% speedup from the on-die memory controller and another 15% from compiler optimization for the additional registers in x86-64 mode.

If you look at how desktop memory sizes have grown in the past 5 years, you'll notice that on the average enthusiast's desktop we've seen a 4x - 16x increase in memory size. If we continue that growth trend you'll see that it will take another 3 - 5 years before the enthusiast desktop reaches the 4GB memory addressability limit of current 32-bit architectures. Being able to use more than 4GB of memory will, without a doubt enable some pretty amazing things on the desktop end but there are other limitations to get around first before memory size becomes an issue.

We asked AMD what they thought of Intel's Hyper-Threading technology and if they would ever support it. As we expected, AMD said that if the technology did take off and received industry support that they could conceivably support it (or maybe a similar technology). For now however AMD sees their 64-bit ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) and affordable multiprocessing as ways of improving performance, not Hyper-Threading.