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Integration Watch: Finally, it's time for 64 bits


By Andrew Binstock
February 15, 2010 —  (Page 1 of 3)
It’s no secret that the cycle of progress in computing is a large step forward in processor technology, followed by catch-up steps in supporting hardware, followed far later by software. This phenomenon has been in place ever since the emergence of the PC as a mass-computing platform. (Prior to that, vendors relied principally on closed systems, so they released hardware advances in conjunction with new software to exploit them.) Processor advances generally lead software by the widest margin. Network advances are probably next; while at the other end of the spectrum, memory architecture leads the least.

Processor breakthroughs, such as multicore and what is now called many-core, are still far from being fully utilized. Most cores on desktops tend to go unused. And even on x86 servers, it took virtualization to sop up all the execution pipelines that today’s server boxes deliver. (Consider that a low-end, four-way box with quad-core CPUs and hyper-threading enabled provides 32 execution paths.)

With Intel pre-announcing a strategy of hugely more cores per chip, it’s clear that parallelism in hardware will greatly exceed software’s reach for years to come. It’s hard to know exactly what factors drive the continued development of hardware features that go unused for so long, but it’s a trend that shows no sign of abating.

An advance that predates multiple cores but that is only now coming into its own is 64-bit computing on the desktop. In 2005, 64-bit extensions were made available on the x86 architecture after the famous AMD-Intel stare-down was won by AMD. Since then, OS vendors have made available 64-bit operating systems that worked well enough on x86 servers but gave desktop users little in the way of benefits. In fact, users who were tempted to use Windows x64 (or the Linux equivalents) found themselves handling a frustrating lack of working device drivers, as well as an absence of software that would take advantage of its 64-bitness. Even today, many PCs that run an x64 version of Windows place most of their apps in the “Program Files (x86)” directory, which is where 32-bit software lives and breathes.

 Related Search Term(s): multicore

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