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AMD

AMD Releases Hammer documentation 37

Posted by timothy from the aim-swing-repeat dept.
Jonathan Graham writes: "Last Thursday AMD posted the five volume architectural manual to their new x86-64 processor on their website. The tomes are as follows: Application Programming, System Programming,General Purpose and System Instructions,128-bit Media Instructions and 64-bit Media and x87 Floating Point Instructions. Gentlemen...start your compilers! (or start writing them!)"
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AMD Releases Hammer documentation More

AMD Releases Hammer documentation

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  • What a waste (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Demona ( 7994 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @12:22AM (#4225639) Homepage
    gcc for Linux has those -i486, 586 and 686 flags, but no -amd flag, so it would seem that your spiffy Duron or Athlon doesn't take advantage of any of the chip's special features, essentially running it like a dumb fast legacy chip. That ain't my idea of efficiency. How many years did it take for the Pentium optimizations to make their way from an IBM lab into egcs and finally the mainstream gcc? By that time, AMD's were selling like hotcakes, especially among the build-your-own crowd. And this was when the dot com bubble was still growing, so it's a real shame AMD didn't stick a few developers on the necessary gcc work for that platform -- now that they're currently releasing the XP's and working on Hammer while phasing out Durons, the timing would have been perfect to release what they had for the older chips and work with the community on integrating it.

    But as the roommate said, if you bothered trying to optimize your software for PC hardware it'll take you at least a year or two, by which time the hardware will be 'hopelessly outdated'. In the meantime, we get laptops that are nothing more than gigahertz crotch-warmers and desktops that are 2 gigahertz room-warmers, effectively dropping jet engines into lawnmowers and seeing a lot of energy diappear into a black hole called FALSE PROGRESS.

    • Re:What a waste (Score:2, Informative)

      by droidix ( 472120 )
      gcc does have -march=athlon though

    • Re:What a waste (Score:4, Informative)

      by leviramsey ( 248057 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @12:59AM (#4225790) Journal
      gcc for Linux has those -i486, 586 and 686 flags, but no -amd flag

      You're not using gcc-3.2, are you?

      gcc-3.2 has both -mcpu=athlon and -march=athlon flags.

      Yeah, gcc-2.95 won't optimize for athlon, but the only excuse for using an outdated compiler like that is if you're a debian user, in which case you don't give a shit about keeping up with the joneses, anyway.

      • Re:What a waste (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Demona ( 7994 )
        Obviously, I wasn't aware of that, or I wouldn't have said what I said. I stand corrected. However, I use Debian, and a whole lot of other Linuxes, and BSD, and Windows, and other OS's where appropriate, so your attempt at being witty comes across as dismissive, juvenile and rude. Big fat surprise, eh? I'll just invoke Godwin's Law now and note that if Hitler used Linux, the Slashbots would have helped write software to send Jews to the gas chambers...

        • Re:What a waste (Score:3, Interesting)

          by leviramsey ( 248057 )

          My apologies for the gratuitous distro flame. Many/most of the debian users I talk to (especially those who are still running potato), when I start talking about how great the latest GNOME/KDE/mozilla/XFree/kernel versions are essentially take the attitude of "so what, kernel 2.2.17 is working fine for me." From this, I deduce that debian users don't necessarily care about having the latest versions of software. I'm not knocking this mindset, but the vaunted stability of Debian has its counterpoints, and this is one of them. OTOH, I run Mandrake's development branch (Cooker being somewhere between Sid and Sarge), and get the latest and greatest (or only a few steps from the edge) versions and damn fine stability to boot... diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.

          • Re:What a waste (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Demona ( 7994 )
            My thoughts precisely, and thanks for your clarification and gracious apology. My first thought on hearing mention of gcc3.2 was, "How many distros use it as default?" I know Gentoo's working on it for their next version, but they're already notorious for being bleeding-edge. As you see, for both my personal use and in various work settings I prefer a mix of current, recent and older software; but of course there are tons of institutions out there who move far slower, and rely far more heavily on things staying the same. (Witness the infinite COBOL, mainframe and assorted other discussions that always come up when someone assumes that history started with the PC...) As you say, the right tool for the right job.

            More to the point, now that I know about -march for Athlons, I'll search it out and give it a try on a test machine. Thanks for the information.


            • Current development sources recognize athlon* as a cpu type. So instead of i686-pc-linux-gnu, I tell build gcc for athlon_mp-pc-linux-gnu, and by default it uses the -march and -mcpu options that turn on the Athlon MP extensions like SSE and whatever.

              Use "gcc -v" to see what triplet you're using.

              This is /not/ in 3.2. I'm not even certain if it's in 3.3.

          • Re:What a waste (Score:1, Interesting)

            by Chexsum ( 583832 )
            Debian has all that and moron^H^He.

            I run the testing distribution of Debian (sarge) which is alot more stable than cooker although I do like the Mandrake distribution and would run it if I had a machine capable of running it.

            I run XFree86-4.2, Mozilla *a few different versions*, GNOME2, Galeon2 and plenty of other packages which Mandrake users read about. I run all this on a AMD k6-II 300/256M POS and occasionally on a P100/32M.

            NB. Dont talk nonsense.
    • ...the Slashbot consensus now is, not only do cool people use only Linux, but cool people only use PC-compatibles. Sort of like the riceboys who get a big kick out of their souped-up piece of crap that a real engineered vehicle leaves in the dust. (Note: By piece of crap, I am referring to PC hardware, not Linux. If you don't see this as a contradiction, you may have two brain cells to rub together.)
      • I think you need to differentiate between "souped up" and "I want it to look like this is souped up". Most souped up cars are fairly subtle, don't want to catch any unwanted attention from the cops.

        The "rice boyz", the dorks who trick their cars out, do stupid stuff:
        • Add a huge exhaust pipe when their engine isn't modded. This decreases performance from the increased back pressure. But it he heh, looks cool. Heh... dooood.
        • Huge spoked rims on drum brakes. No real racer would have drum brakes, too fade prone. Worse is when they paint the drums body color, which infinitessibly hurts performance (more unsprung weight, more rotational inertia) and makes heat dissipation not as efficient, so slightly adds to fading.
        • The wings, all they do is add drag. Why have on a front wheeel drive car? Pressure is friction, but in a front driver, they don't help much. You'll bite at the back. I guess in some respects it is good, cause it will slow the morons down and give them understeer, so they won't be idiots and fishtail into oncoming traffic.
        • Super low sidewall tires. They help cornering, but do shit to ride quality. Hope they jar their fillings out.
        • High colored interiors. Saw one car with a bright yellow interior. Imagine the reflections off that? There's a reason everything in a real car is boring flat black, nothing to distract you.

    • gcc already supports the amd x86-64 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @10:52AM (#4228125) Homepage
      See gcc news [gnu.org].

  • GCC already supports x86-64 (Score:3, Informative)

    by vojtech ( 565680 ) <vojtech@suse.cz> on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @02:23AM (#4226074)
    Why talk about athlon optimizations? GCC already supports the x86-64 arch, and Linux runs on it, see http://www.x86-64.org
    • "Why talk about older technology that many people currently own and are still buying? I have support for what I want." Hint: Some of us like the idea of being able to take advantage of a broad range of hardware.

      Not everything that's newer is better just because it's new. And not everything that's older is better just because it's old. To me, one of free software's greatest strengths is its ability to take advantage of almost any niche, from the bleeding edge to the dusty distant past. Not that I personally know anyone who's recently compiled in support for those XT hard drive controllers, but I'll support to the death the developers' right to #include it.

  • Virtualization? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phr2 ( 545169 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @03:13AM (#4226184)
    I looked at the table of contents for the system programming manual and don't see any features for supporting self-virtualization beyond what's in the Pentium etc. I wonder what kinds of hoops it will take to make something like Plex86 virtualize the 86-64. I wish they'd add some hardware virtualization features since with these big processors, running multiple 'partitions' becomes more and more important.

    I also notice that cycle counts aren't specified for the fancier arithmetic instructions like MUL and the multimedia instructions. Those make a big difference in the performance of graphics and signal processing applications including audio compression and so forth. So I guess we'll have to wait to see benchmarks.

    • I wish they'd add some hardware virtualization features

      I am curious what features you'd like to see that aren't there already.
      The only thing that I can see lacking is the ability to virtualize in level 3 without level 0 support.
      It would be nice if a (non-software-only) VM could operate entirely in "user" space.
    • Did you spot any improvements to threading and SMP? More fine grained cache management, read-write states. easier state switching between processes/threads. etc.... Why do you think Intel is hyperthreading there core? so that next time round they can realy put two processers in there and sort out the threading men from the boys.

      My 2x2.5Ghz beats your 1x5Ghz
  • These have been out for at least 6 months. However these are dated September, so they must be updated. Every time I try to get them to send me the last three of the set, they just send me another set of the first two, so I have 4 sets of the first two. Kinda irritating.

    • Re:Old news. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Phosphor3k ( 542747 )
      Guess I should have hit the links first. Didnt realize they link to pdfs. If you go to amds order page, you can get any documentation they offer (so they say) in book form, for free.Here's a link to the x86-64 5 volume order page:

      http://sausmaps.amd.com/AMDeMA/www/cpg_tech_manu al_order_form.jsp

      Personally, I perfer my documentation in book, not electronic form.
  • AMD Releases Hammer documentation

    So what they're saying is, "You can touch this," right?

  • This will be good platform for next development project. I code lots for GP32 and have many hours on assembler coding for other architectures. PDFs are good, but need more detail for assembly coders.

  • Gentlemen...start your compilers! (or start writing them!)"

    What, so no females use/develop linux? Maybe it seems like that...

    Ali

    • Re:Sheer sexism (Score:3, Interesting)

      by oliverthered ( 187439 )
      Ok seeing as you failed your English (like me)...

      him/man is the indefinite neuter
      her/she is the definite neuter.

      Gentlemen is correctish just like
      Fire man, post man, She's your man, There are twelve men in the all woman team. take you men...

      America and her army,
      She sailed today (referring to a ship).
      She's a beauty....

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