FiringSquad: What steps are AMD taking to evangelize its 64-bit architecture to game developers?
Henri Richard: Well we’re working hard at, of course, supporting our software ISVs. You know, making sure they’re very consistent at driving [forward]. One of the things that I think is very interesting is that on one side software developers are ecstatic about 64-bit. They like our 64-bit environment because it’s very easy to port to, you don’t have to retrain your developers to 64-bit extensions. The 64-bit extensions are really extensions to the 32-bit environment. So unlike other architectures where you have to completely relearn the language and the compiler, building 64-bit software with AMD-64 is very easy.
But on the other hand it is very backward compatible, and so some developers are just taking an easier route, which is instead of optimizing the entire architecture or porting the entire application they are really looking at which DLL in their product, which DLL would really benefit from 64-bit, and you have the ability to go and somewhat optimize that application without completely rewriting it, keeping some parts of the application in 32-bit and just porting the 64-bit, the code that will benefit the most from that 64-bitness.
So on one side we see a lot of excitement, we see people are very happy with the ease of porting. And on the other side we’ve got also the path of least resistance, which is well, here’s my 32-bit application it works great so I’m not necessarily in a hurry to port to 64-bit, or, I’m only going to port the pieces that are going to get the most kick in terms of performance and we’ll do a full 64-bit application later. We’re seeing the full spectrum, we’ve got software vendors that are very aggressively porting and we’ve got the people who are just trying to optimize under the environment and we’ve got others that are saying, you know, I’m going to go ahead and certify my 32-bit app because I’m getting great performance from Athlon 64 in 32-bit mode and I’ll do a 64-bit port later.
FiringSquad: Are you seeding developers with hardware, or is, exactly how is the process working?
Henri Richard: We have a lab. Well, there’s different things, of course we’re trying to help software developers with technical support, you know, this type of system and everything that’s standard in the industry in terms of helping software developers support their product.
We also have a lab in Sunnyvale and we’re opening other labs in several locations around the world, where developers can come in and work on our machines and we make them available to them. It’s more relevant to high performance computing, we’re building some very impressive clusters where developers can come and test their code. Then I believe that we also have game development people that are coming in. We’re also doing a lot of work with the people in the video industry because that’s another area where the AMD-64 architecture is providing some very significant advantages.
[inaudible]
We also have a system lab where developers can come and test their code on very large AMD-64 based systems.
FiringSquad: Epic has been pretty vocal about their support for AMD-64, adding 64-bit extensions to Unreal Tournament and using it for development of their next generation game engine. What other game developers are using AMD-64 technology?
Henri Richard: I think developers will move very aggressively into 64-bit because it’s such a competitive software industry. I mean it’s really cutthroat, and you will see some of the big titles like Unreal, like Far Cry that are going to be out there and people are going to see the improvement in both texture and artificial intelligence that the AMD-64 environment provides and you’ll have to switch. So some folks are more aggressive than others, but again as I told you the transition to the 64-bit development environment is so painless, it’s really very simple. So my expectation is that by next Christmas all of the key editors, all of the people that really make the game software industry, will have some level of their library of titles that are either optimized or completely ported to AMD-64. I have yet to meet any of the big leaders in the game industry that have turned down the value of AMD-64.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of our interview with AMD’s Henri Richard, topics discussed include Athlon 64 pricing, AMD’s future plans, the 0.09-micron transition next year, and Windows 64-bit! FiringSquad would like to thank Brenda Rarick and Damon Muzny of AMD’s PR department for granting us this interview as well as Henri Richard for taking the time out of his busy schedule to chat with us for the interview. We asked a lot of questions and he tackled every one of them!
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Multi-core processors, Hyper-Threading, the Athlon 64 FX versus Pentium 4 Extreme Edition battle – there are lots of potential topics to chat about in the news comments!
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition/Hyper-Threading/Multi-Core CPUs
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