[Gllug] Which architecture?

[John Hearns]

2009/5/1 John Winters <john at sinodun.org.uk>:
> On Fri, 01 May 2009 13:34:25 +0100, James Holland
> <holland.james at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> [snip]
>> So you can run AMD64 on Intel then??
>
> Yes, provided you have a 64-bit capable processor.  Intel did have a stab
> at their own 64 bit architecture (ia64) but AFAIK it's been pretty much
> abandoned.

You've been reading the Register a bit too much :-)
Itanium / ia64 is alive and very much kicking, and are really good
machines for certain classes of HPC problems.
If you want a machine with many, many processors and Tbytes of RAM in
a single system image then ia64 is your choice today.


Having said that, Intel delaying the next generation of Itanium which
is pin-compatible with Nehalem really put the kybosh on the
next class of SGI supercomputers - Ultraviolet. Patches for UV are
still going into the kernel, and here's hoping it will see the light
of day.



Regarding the processor naming, the architecture is x86_64 which was
first produced by AMD of course.
On Sun Gridengine the architecture is named amd64, adn there are
regular posts from the mailing list asking if it will work on Xeon 74
bit (which is referred to as emt64 by Intel).
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug