The enlargement of the address space is going to be demanded in desktop applications in the near future, however the 2GB of RAM will be quite a rare thing to see in desktops in the next few years.

The extra registers in the CPU give new opportunities to the developer. They can store function parameters and allow placing independent commands in the code more efficiently without accessing the memory extra times. Moreover, the optimizing compiler will take care of all of this. Thanks to the increased number of registers, the CPU will have a higher workload, while the memory bus – lower. This seems to be one of the major advantages. The thing is that modern CPUs feature a lot of lazy write buffers that allow swapping the registers without loading the memory that heavily. If the sent data is immediately called for again, it’s taken from the buffer in no time and not from the memory. By the way, the number of such buffers has been increased in Prescott.

The new AMD’s processor is going to be a success in server systems. It doesn’t fear branching, has a large address space and many registers, can encode very fast. It all suits well for a database server. Acceptable pricing may make it an ideal solution in a certain niche.

As for its perspectives in the desktop market, especially in heavy graphics applications, like 3D games, it can do quite well there, too. What factors determine the performance in a computer game? First, it’s scene transformation, cutting down invisible elements with the portal technology, AI and physical model calculations. The second factor is fast data exchange with the graphics accelerator. The sky-high frequencies of Intel processors as well as high system bus frequency are going to help in “feeding” the video processing unit. As for the performance of the game engine itself, AMD looks stronger here. Its processor is more tolerant to branching, which often occurs in applications like that. 3DNow! also might be of some help as it offers a handy instruction set to process geometrical objects. Moreover, as AMD Athlon 64 requires recompilation of existing applications, the 3DNow! optimization will be now carried out automatically by the compiler, without any intervention on the developer’s part.

If Intel didn’t introduce new instructions in Prescott, we should certainly prefer Athlon 64, which seems to have no drastic weaknesses. And with the today’s state of things, we cannot be sure any more.

Intel offers optimized program libraries and the new instructions to software developers, which are certainly going to be used to the utmost effect. AMD also went this way and announced its libraries fully utilizing x86-64 capabilities.

There is one more circumstance. There have been rumors about Intel going to implement the AMD x86-64 architecture in its Prescott CPUs if this architecture becomes a success. Seems like a sci-fi thing: we haven’t seen anything like that! On the other hand, as AMD is already delaying the launch of Athlon 64, it might include into its new CPU the new Prescott instructions. Then all Prescott-optimized libraries would work well on AMD CPUs. Prescott will no longer have any advantages due to more convenient instructions. Especially, since there should be no big problems with it: AMD CPUs have been long executing flexible 3DNow! operations. In fact, I would expect AMD to introduce these “horizontal” operations with the data due to more suitable processor core architecture, lover frequencies, bigger number of execution units, etc.

We hope AMD will do it as fast as possible, because it will willy-nilly have to implement SSE developments into its processors, as it has always done.