Re: Hammer

["Christopher C. Chimelis" <chris debian org>]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Peter Watkinson wrote:

> OK we've seen about Itanium and how much that costs how about the AMD Hammer
> what I've heard is that it should debut in 1H 02 and be clocked at about
> 2ghz. Will it run x86 linux out of the box or will it need it's own
> distribution? Has anyone any idea what it will cost? Does anyone know what
> the projected Spec or other Benchmark figures are?

>From what I've seen so far, Hammer will be able to run current x86-32
Linux out of the box.  Kernel changes area already being made inside AMD
for supporting the new instructions (so I've heard, at least).  Current
toolchains do not have support for the Hammer line, though, so until the
new "extended extended" register naming scheme changes are in the various
toolchain CVS trees, I doubt anyone will be able to actually compile for a
Hammer native target from any non-low-level language (shouldn't take that
long to get that support in, fyi).

> Now that Alpha seems to be swimming with the fishes we'll have to consider

Ugh...here we go.  I still haven't heard the proverbial "fat lady" singing
yet (nor has Elvis left the building).  Alphas are still being shipped and
made and EV7 is still slated...it's just after that point where things are
unclear.  Re-read the Compaq-Intel PRs...they're a lot less clear about
what exactly was "sold" to Intel.

> the alternatives and Hammer seems to me like it has the most similarity to
> the Alpha  - or maybe it just appeals because it's not made by Intel!

Probably the latter.  I think the Hammer is quite interesting, but not
revolutionary (IA-64 is quite a bit more revolutionary, but the problems
are more grounded in reality and practice than concept).  In the end,
though, Hammer should do very well and should boast some impressive
numbers.

C