The Future and Software

Tomorrow’s Opteron

In a recent presentation to members of the press, AMD took an opportunity to peek into its future. It’s all quite general and perhaps none of the information comes as a surprise to those who expect trends to carry through the industry; however, AMD’s plans currently include more cores (4 and 8), improved memory technology support (DDR2, DDR3, and FB-DIMM technology, should it catch on), improved I/O in the form of HyperTransport 3 and the second generation of PCI Express, and better power management through split power planes.

Without an accompanying timeline, those claims are about as useful as NVIDIA saying future graphics architectures will be even more parallel and support larger frame buffers. Who would have guessed? Then again, at least we know AMD isn’t planning on holding onto DDR forever and raw clock frequency isn’t the definitive answer to delivering more performance.

Wait. Hasn’t AMD said that all along? Eh hem, moving on…

Software Infrastructure

One of the sticking points Intel used to contest the viability of 64-bit processing back when AMD’s Athlon 64 first launched was software support. As it were, there weren’t any mainstream operating systems that’d expose the technology. Linux, for all of its strengths, is still hardly mainstream.

While Microsoft clearly has a lot on its plate, what, with patching the holes in Windows XP and pushing Longhorn back into 2006, it took an especially long time to get XP running in 64-bit mode, despite all of AMD’s efforts to help hardware vendors write beta drivers. Only now is the operating system ready for retail consumption.

Admittedly, that was the pitch from the beginning. AMD64 enabled top performance in existing 32-bit apps while facilitating the flexibility to adopt 64-bit technology when the time came. In addition to the enhanced memory addressability and extra registers acquired by running the Opteron in 64-bit mode, both Windows XP x64 and Windows Server x64 will also be better optimized for dual-core operation through NUMA (non-uniform memory access) awareness, meaning that they assign threads from particular processing cores to attached memory for lower latency. Existing Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 versions, even with their respective service packs, recognize basic multi-core functionality, but are not NUMA-aware.

Even still, the existing crop of 32-bit operating systems will demonstrate increased speed in threaded applications and multi-tasking environments thanks to dual-core processing. Among the workstation loads cited by AMD, digital content creation, computer-aided engineering, and electronic design automation are among the most compute-intensive, so you can expect to see those titles really take off in the face of available power.