I saw a headline at Anand that AMD’s CEO is resigning – possibly because despite saving the company from extinction, the board probably wants to sell AMD off. Reading about AMD, and having just completed an Intel/Nvidia build with barely any consideration of AMD or ATI this time around, makes me remember that wacky blogger “Sharikou, Ph.D.” who was the ultimate AMD partisan fanboi back in the day.
Sure enough, he’s still around, and still pushing the AMD kool aid. Last we checked in with sharikou was almost three years ago, where he was predicting Intel going bankrupt in 2Q08. Obviously that didn’t happen, but it’s pretty funny to search his blog for the terms “intel bk”.
April 12 2007: Intel will BK 2Q08
October 17 2007: Intel will BK 1Q09
October 26 2007: Intel will BK 4 quarters after Phenom enters the market (Phenom entered March 2008)
December 1 2007: Intel will BK 1Q09
September 8 2009: Intel BK in 2011 (quarter unspecified)
So basically, once 2008 rolled around, Sharikou stopped predicting Intel’s demise. Late September, well past his oft-extended deadline, he punted. This seems to be the big year, but Sharikou has yet to narrow down the date. 😛
At any rate, Sharikou is right that 64-bit computing is indeed pervasive now, with Windows 7 and Vista. It’s practically impossible to build or buy a 32 bit system nowadays. I can’t believe I am rocking 8 GB of fully-addressable RAM, and upgrading to 16GB will cost less than $100. (but is there any point? none I can see, even for MATLAB). I’m not entirely clear what other advantages having 64bits gives me, but it’s pretty cool. 2^6, baby!!
The only question remaining is whether AMD’s CEO resignation will delay, or speed up, Intel’s BK.
Actually, using PAE, a 32-bit O.S. can access up to 64 GB of RAM, so really, that 4 GB limitation hasn’t actually been there since the Pentium Pro. Unfortunately, Microsoft only enabled this on their higher-end Server-level Windows. Of course, every other major 32-bit based O.S. either had full PAE support already (Mac OS X on x86, more recent Linux distributions by default) or you could install a PAE-enabled kernel (FreeBSD, all Linux distros that don’t enable it by default). Pretty much a moot point for me, though, as I’m running 64-bit OSes on my Windows 7 gaming desktop and my Ubuntu linux work laptop now (My main file server is still running a 32-bit CentOS install with 2 GB RAM, but that’ll eventually be replaced once I can build a new gaming system with my current desktop).
This wikipedia section probably has most of the pros and cons of 32-bit vs. 64-bit architectures.
hey Nick, I’d be interested in the details of your current gaming system, as well as your thoughts on the new one you plan to build. Care to share?
It’s been a while since I’ve actually listed out the actual specs of my system. The last time I’ve listed out the parts was this post in my general blog in 2007. Since then, I’ve upgraded to a 2.6 GHz Phenom II Quad core, 8 Gigs of RAM, had to replace the power supply, I switched to using the on-board audio, and the Video card was replaced by an ATI HD 5700 series card. When I get home from work, I’ll see about getting some better and more recent details up.
But yeah, I still game with it, usually with graphics set to high quality.