What can we expect from IA-64?

Remote said:

With the upcoming release of AMD's IA-64 processor Operaton, which from what I've read is going to boost performance by another couple of percentages in most applications, I can't help to wonder what effect this will have on N64 emulation? Are there any obvious pros / cons by making an emu 64bit? And what performance increase can we expect?

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Well, I don't think this will help emulation too much at all, except maybe for memory mapping. A few places where it will help is video editing and with big databases, since it will speed up the handling of large files (>2 GB) significantly.

actully, the faster the cpu (mhz) it is, the better it is for emulation, especially n64 emulation, and new processors tend to be bloody fast

Sayargh said:

actully, the faster the cpu (mhz) it is, the better it is for emulation, especially n64 emulation, and new processors tend to be bloody fast

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Remote said:

With the upcoming release of AMD's IA-64 processor Operaton, which from what I've read is going to boost performance by another couple of percentages in most applications, I can't help to wonder what effect this will have on N64 emulation?

Click to expand...

Just a small correction: the name of the CPU is Opteron (the server ones), and Athlon64 (the desktop ones). Another thing, it won't use IA-64. The IA-64 is Intel's 64-bit solution, used by the Itanium CPUs. The Hammer (Opteron/Athlon64) will use an architecture named x86-64, which is the x86 we use nowadays with 64-bit extensions. I now this is just details, I'm just nitpicking.

Anyway, in order to make a 64-bit based emu, we would need a 64-bit OS, which won't become popular anytime soon, I can assure you. Yes, there would be some advantages and probably some speed improvement (we don't know how good is AMD's 64-bit implementation), but I don't think we're in the right moment to think about it. Wait until 64-bit systems are used by most people, and then probably we will start to see some 64-bit based emulation.

I would say not much .. n64 emus probaly could be speed up .. but the question comes to why .. you would have to re-write the complete dynamic recompiler .. and the speeds of the cpu that are being used means that it is not really going to be speed up .. so the work vs reward makes the work to look like a waste of time

Re: Re: What can we expect from IA-64?

Zephon said:

Just a small correction: the name of the CPU is Opteron (the server ones), and Athlon64 (the desktop ones). Another thing, it won't use IA-64. The IA-64 is Intel's 64-bit solution, used by the Itanium CPUs. The Hammer (Opteron/Athlon64) will use an architecture named x86-64, which is the x86 we use nowadays with 64-bit extensions. I now this is just details, I'm just nitpicking.

Anyway, in order to make a 64-bit based emu, we would need a 64-bit OS, which won't become popular anytime soon, I can assure you. Yes, there would be some advantages and probably some speed improvement (we don't know how good is AMD's 64-bit implementation), but I don't think we're in the right moment to think about it. Wait until 64-bit systems are used by most people, and then probably we will start to see some 64-bit based emulation.

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You can already get 64-bit linux. I might even get an opteron rig if they are not priced on the same line as itanium 1MB L2 cache will sure speed up a load of stuff, like compiling :happy:

Sayargh said:

actully, the faster the cpu (mhz) it is, the better it is for emulation, especially n64 emulation, and new processors tend to be bloody fast

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Actually, the Opteron will be slower, MHz-wise, than previous AMD processors. However, it's MHz/performance ratio will be much, much more like RISC processors. I remember reading a review, and this was like 3 months ago, with a very much prerelease chip, saying that a 1.6 GHz Opteron totaly blew a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 out of the water.

The real performance boost has nothing to do with whether it's 64-bit or not, both solutions offer a plethora of registers compared to IA-32. Altho, I'm partial to IA-64 not X86-64, but I suppose for N64 emulation even I would admit X86-64 solution will be alot easier to port to... and would probably offer most of the performance increase an equal IA-64 port would of had.

Actually, thinking for a moment, 64-bit processing might help N64 emulation somewhat. I dunno for sure though, or whether most games even take advantage of the 64-bit processing of the r4300i...

But anyway, AMD's Hammer line in 64-bit mode also has on the order of twice as many registers as 32-bit... so that should boost things some.

Added: And by the way, Jabo, I think you're thinking of the Tom's Hardware Guide preview of Hammer, and they found that the 1.6 Athlon64 did not keep up with the mid-to-high-end P4's... though of course clock-for-clock it was even more efficient than AthlonXP.