Mobile Atom SoC to Remain 32-bit at Least Until 2015
Leaked roadmaps of the upcoming Atom Valleyview-T Atom SoC provide new details about Intel's processor for tablets.
The 22 nm Valleyview-T SoC and its Bay Trail-T platform promise a 50 to 60 percent performance improvement or half the power consumption at a comparable performance. Valleyview-T, which is based on the Silvermont core, will debut as a quad-core SoC with a clock speed ranging from 1.6 GHz to 2.1 GHz. Also noteworthy is the fact that the platform will support screen resolutions of up to 2560x1600 pixels, as well as 3D video capture in 1080p/60 fps.
Somewhat surprising is the notion that Intel will keep its Silvermont Atom processor as a 32-bit platform at least through 2014. Customers who need 64-bit capability in Atom will have to consider the microserver-focused Centerton Atom-S processor. It is unclear whether the Silvermont successor, the 14 nm Airmont, will be moving to 64-bit.
We remember that Intel has a history of delaying 64-bit support on mobile platforms. For example, Intel's first 65 nm processor and the first CPU released under the "Core" brand - the Core Solo/Duo with Yonah Core - were offered in 2006 as 32-bit processors only, even if the company offered a 64-bit variant with Sossaman core for servers at the time. Intel claimed that there was no need for a 64-bit CPU in the mobile market it was targeting.
In the mean time, Intel and Microsoft made a secret deal to delay a 64 bit consumer Windows as long as possible so that AMD64 does not give AMD any actual advantage or selling point.
Then there's the matter of how badly Microsoft and ISV's continues to botch 64 bit Windows compatibility to this day... There are numerous documented incompatibilities between Microsoft Office files saved with 32/64 bit versions of Office. Such things are unheard of in Linux/GCC, which properly supported AMD64 from right around the time it came out.
Yeah but even MS recommends using the 32-bit version of Office 2013, and that's what i did with the preview. Does office even exist as a 64-bit version (apart from the current preview/trial version for 2013)?
The first two comments on this just shows that they dont know what 64bit is for....
All 64bit is for to access more RAM beyond the 32bit 4gig address barrier....
Nothing more... It gives no performance boost or anything else for that matter...
Back in the old days, the transition from 16bit to 32bit was a giant leap because cpu instructions were too constricted, but that is simply not the case with 32->64...
And since phones don't need to access great big globs of RAM, it makes sense to keep them at 32bit... why bother wasting resources on a phone(especially a phone) that are not needed yet?
All 64bit is for to access more RAM beyond the 32bit 4gig address barrier....
Nothing more... It gives no performance boost or anything else for that matter...
This is not true, a 64 bit program can be a lot faster than a 32 bit program, but as usual the software lags behind the hardware and the advantage of the 64 bits is lost. It also depends on the type of program being run, some maths intensive programs run a lot faster when running 64 bit software.
It's totally relevant to Atom because the ONLY selling point of x86 is compatibility with the full version of Windows, aka not the gimped ARM version of Windows, which Atom promises to continue perpetuating the need for a 32bit version by being the only 32bit x86 CPU you can still buy...
Make sense?
True, me too really. But think about it, most people aren't using more than 2GB RAM in their DESKTOPS, gamers for now don't really need more than 4GB, only people like you and me have 8GB+ in their rigs.
I've always found the need for >1GB RAM in mobile operating systems indicative of poor optimization than anything else. I mean, Win 7/8 need only 1GB min to run in 32-bit mode, and 2GB in 64-bit. And they're full blown operating systems.
Sure, i'd like to see 64-bit architectures ready for mobile, but at the same time if they offer no advantage at present (possible disadvantage?), i think they there's no point. By 2014/15 i think most of the world's PCs would have transitioned to Win7 at least and 64-bit desktop operating systems should be very common. Then mobile will make the transition too.
I don't remember Apple, Google or MS even talking about 64-bit mobile operating systems. I'm not too sure about the Win 8 Pro tablets, though. Makes more sense for MS, since they want consistency across devices. They might be the ones to eventually push the change to 64-bit. (Doesn't the Surface Pro already have 64-bit Win 8 Pro? it has 4GB RAM, after all...)
There's more stuff, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit
Might also be interesting to note that current desktop processors aren't fully 64-bit either, probably why they're known as 64-bit extensions for x86...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64
the only reason to have 64bit in mobile is like someone said, to have more than 4GB of RAM. given the fact that smartphones already have 2GB, I would consider that 2015 is a bit late, 2014 or late 2013 would be a better choice IMHO.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1210_3264&num=1
You see, if you're not a programmer, and not an electrical engineer, don't assume that because you think you have a basic laymans understanding of software and hardware, that you can necessarily understand cause and effect of CPU architecture.... It's complicated, and throw in Microsoft's bad code for some extra "WTF", and anything can happen.
Ok first off, the difference between "32-bit" and "64-bit" when referring to an ISA is the size of the register stack. A 64-bit register can hold and process a 64-bit value, meaning you can directly read and write to a 64-bit memory address. In 99% of all case's this is strictly a memory management issue as most code doesn't involved 64-bit values and the little that does can use SSE which has it's own 64-bit registers and functions more like a co-processor.
Now with respect to the NT Kernel implementation of x86 and AMD64 ISA's there is a huge gigantic difference between the two. Firstly kernel can not execute non-native code in kernel space, this means the 64-bit NT Kernel is unable to directly execute 32-bit code, this is why kernel mode drivers all need to be 64-bit in order to work in a NT 64-bit system. Now for userland there is WoW64 (Windows on Windows) which is a form of environmental virtualization. This is required as NT 64 and NT x86 are vastly different kernels with different memory architectures. The NT x86 memory architecture was designed back in NT 4.0 days and has remained largely unaltered over the years to preserve backwards compatibility. This has introduced several security and efficiency issues over the years that could not be properly addressed and instead had work-around's created.
With NT x64 MS had a chance to rewrite the kernel code and they took that opportunity to permanently fix many of these issues. This created a form of native sand-boxing and a significantly improved stability and security posture. Right now it's pretty much impossible for an application to crash an NT x64 kernel. Buggy drivers are a different issue as their running in kernel mode and can play havoc on the system, though MS has gone through great strides to try to implement on-the-fly driver resets.
WoW64 doesn't "emulate" a 32-bit kernel as much as it emulated the older NT x86 environment. Applications can still make kernel calls and do everything they could do on a NT x86 system, the WoW64 engine will trap them and emulate them while not letting the application actually talk directly to the kernel. The AMD64 ISA allows for mixed 32/64 bit code execution, so there is no emulation of a 32-bit CPU happening, only the operating environment is being emulated.
from http://insertcredit.com/2007/02/
from http://insertcredit.com/2007/02/
Apples and Oranges.
We're talking about generic computing, SIMD vector instructions are a completely separate component of your CPU. There is a separate register file and instruction set just for the SIMD components, their names are SSE and now AVX / FMA. When talking about x86 vs x64 we're talking the generic ALU / MMC components.