128Bit CPU's

[ArchangelMBC]

I was wondering with all the advantages gained from 32bit to 64bit processors, why I haven't heard anything about people developing 128bit processors.

[Donkey]

Hold your horses arch. i am sure they will make them eventually but they are only jusy coming up with the 64bit ones. Remember they have to have plenty of time so everyone buys them and updates all the softwere etc and becomes happy with 64 bit before they drop the bombshell that what we are using is no longer good enough and we must upgrade AGAIN!
but no doubt that time will come sooner rather than later.
Rod

[ArchangelMBC]

Sun and others have had 64bit cpu's for more than a few years now. But I figure someone is doing research on a 128bit platform somewhere. Would like to get any information I could about that, purely interest.Thanks

[Mr.Goodbytes]

I may be wrong, but isn't the Motorola processor in the G4 a 128 bit chip?

[daveleau]

Macs are 64bit and the G4 may be 128, Not up on my Mac specs. I am surprised that PCs have not gone that route yet with the desire for greater speeds.
Dave

[jl123]

Yes the G4's are 128bit cpu's. That's what make the G4 good for photo and video editing. I have a friend who has a brother that went that route. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif His grandma bought him a G4 because he does a lot of photo and video editing....he works for his dad's buisness. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

PC's are still better. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif I can't wait til the AMD sledgehammer comes out. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif That is AMD's 64bit processor. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/biggrin.gif

~Joel

[Roy]

The soon-to-be-released Pentium IV is 128 bit and much, much more. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[jl123]

nevermind http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

~Joel

[This message has been edited by jl123 (edited 11-06-2000).]

[NDC]

The soon-to-be-released Pentium IV is 128 bit and much, much more.

Not quite, The new Pentium 4 is a 32bit processor and the soon to be released Intel "Itanium" is a 64bit processor, There isn't a true-128bit processor,yet by Intel.

Not even the MAC G4's are true-128bit processors, they use a technology known as
"128-bit vector processing technology" that is supported by limited programs. Adobe Photoshop for example is one of them that takes advantage of the Vector Processing Technology.

Go here to learn more about Vector Processing:
http://www.apple.com/g4/

[voogru]

what about 256Bit cpu's? and 512Bit cpu's and 1024 Bit cpus Imagine the power!

-voogru

[Dputiger]

I could be WAY off here, but isn't there a difference between internal and external bit rates?

I was under the impression that the EXISTING Athlon had an internal 64-bit data bus while the P-III CuMine used a 256-bit data bus. Both chips, however, had only a 32-bit data bus externally. Am I just confused?

[capnjosh]

Getting back to the higher 64bit, 128bit, and higher-bus processors, the main reason companies haven't develped them already is because most all existing software would have to be reworked, at the very least, in order to accomodate the new instruction set required by the processor. It is largely a market demand issue that larger-bus processors haven't been developed: nobody wants to redesign their software.
Something pretty cool has developed with Transmeta Corp.'s creation of their Crusoe line of processors. It seems they have devised a way to get around the issue of software having to be reworked to accomodate drastic changes in chip architecture. They are using a software translation system between the chip and the software so that when the chip is changed or modified in the future, all the software that has to be changed is the traslation layer. All the operating system and applications don't have to be changed at all.
So, now we may see an increase in the speed of development in the microprocessor industry. This could be really, oh, good http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[CMonster]

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the G4 CPU!

The G4 is an awesome chip! The superscaler core basically consists of 2 32bit interger units working in parallel, and an FPU unit that appears to be 64bit wide or at least produces 64bit result. The AltiVec unit (the vectored part) can handle 4, 32bit words in parallel (either interger or floating point) or 8, 16bit interger words, or 16, 8 bit words (like a single pixel) in parallel in a single clock cycle! Awesome SIMD!

However, programs need to be optimized with the AltiVec extended instruction set similar to the way PC programs may use MMX, SSE, or 3D-Now. Just how much of Photoshop was optimized for the G4s Altivec unit is unknown but the good folks at Adobe probably just optimized the photoshop module that would benefit most from it.

In Benchmarks at the same clock speed as a PC the G4 will BLOW the PC out of the way, but as you increase the PCs clock by 150-200mhz or more the difference becomes less apparent. With the fastest G4s running 450mhz and the PCs now up in the Ghz range the fastest execution for the desktop dollars $ may favor PCs (at home where we do not care much about power consumption) -- however, for scientific applications where efficiency is measured in MFLOP per watt the G4 has got to be one of the best ways to go.

[Dputiger]

From what your saying, CMonster, unless the code is optimized for AltiVec, their is no effective performance gain from using a G4.

Furthermore, until G4's are available at higher speeds, their theoretical performance is just that--theoretical. I'm not anti-Mac or attacking the spirit of what your saying--just making sure I've got it right.

[Variable]

I though I read somewhere (on Sysopt) that it really doesn't make sense to go beyond 64bit because you will not really gain anything (no performance at least).
Could it be because a 64bit CPU is wider/better/faster than anything imagenable in the next 20-50 years? (meaning you will need much higher Hz ratings [9000GHz+??) and much more memory [1000 GB RAM] before it makes sense?)

[Ruahrc]

Just a thought-

If we have to rewrite software for each step up (32 to 64, 64 to 128, etc) then why don't we start skipping? Instead of focusing on making a 64-bit chip, let's jump to a 128-bit. Nintendo did this by skipping 32-bit and going straight for the N64, and had pretty good success.

Just my $0.02

ruahrc

[NDC]

Microsoft's new release of Windows will be a 64-bit Operating System to support the soon to be released Intel "Itanium" which will be a 64-bit processor, and there will also be a new release of NT64 with 32-bit backward compatibility. I'm sure that we will see more programs written in 64bit architecture when these OS's are released. And yes, 64-bit OS and apps should be much faster than 32-bit since data will be processes at double rate. Data will be processed in 64bit chunks rather than 32bit chunks.

Look here to learn more about the new OS's:

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/6/ns-6978.html

http://www.zdnet.com/tlkbck/comment/41/0,7092,91856-491270,00.html

[otheos]

still no G4 does scince. Suns are the workhorse number-crunchers (some alphas too) but with cheap x86 chips from AMD (with very fast FPU unit) and the UltraSparc3 being too late, I've seen at least an increase to almost 50% of numbercrunchers being Athlons (running linux of course).

[CMonster]

Yes! To fully utilize the Altivec unit of the G4 software must be optimized - my point exactly. ....And, to fully utilize any CPU software must be optimized for it.

I have a best-friend who is in the high-end computer industry and on his word they make very good use of the G4 in scientific applications; things like radar imaging.

He often describes low-end systems containing 3+ "boards" with 16 G4s each and each CPU having its own 128MB or RAM..etc.