KublaKhan Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Hey kids, Check out this Article about the Intel Core Duo chips found in the new Intel Macs Yeah I know, it's awesome! I found it through digg.com. I believe there are some MSDN subscibers out there who have access to 64 bit Windows... or 64 bit Longhorn? Just make sure you get the one with EFI support. Was this why we couldn't dual boot yet? Everyone has always been saying that the dual core chips aren't 64bit, but now Intel admits that they are. Could this be the missing piece in the puzzle? You know, Apple already had 64 bit support for a while... so this could be very probable . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mk14 Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Interesting. But the 64-bit capabilities are not currently activated and useable on the CoreDuo; it does not identify itself as having EM64T capabilities. But Intel may be able to enable the 64-bit capabilities through some kind of firmware upgrade. And if it's deep-down hidden, it seems very, very unlikely that Apple would have used the 64-bit capabilities or even known about them. But anyway, that wouldn't mean that it wouldn't be able to run 32-bit operating systems. This kind of 64-bit just means x86-64, which runs 32-bit operating systems just fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KublaKhan Posted February 11, 2006 Author Share Posted February 11, 2006 Whoops! I already posted this on a few forums... can't hurt to try though can it? By the way, Apple might have known about. Their OS is already 64 bit compatible.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyrana Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 No point in even trying, the chips aren't 64bit. OS X for example, only has some libraries and console portions that are 64bit-enabled. The whole of the OS is not. In the case of the Windows 64bit OSes, you can't even boot them on a 32 bit system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aiongiant Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 isn't windows xp 64bit already support EFI?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R. Bear Helms Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 I have a 64-bit Pentium 4 CPU in my PC by those standards. Actually, it would be good for SOME os to exploit the new addressing scheme, but maybe in Vista... It boots OS X with JaS patches, but doesn't get much farther than a Kernel Panic about not being able to map the commpage. What's about having real SSE3 support that it doesn't like? That message makes less sense to me than "The overlock hyperfuse component of your interrositer needs transtating." isn't windows xp 64bit already support EFI??Windows Vista is said to work on EFI. Of course, for Microsoft to have any market to sell Vista in to, they will have to support good ol' BIOS because almost all Windows users have non EFI machines. And I don't think much of anyone wants to buy a whole new PC just to run Vista. If you're going that far overboard, get the iMac Core Duo and send the right message to Mr Gates! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mk14 Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 I have a 64-bit Pentium 4 CPU in my PC by those standards. Actually, the only current Intel-CPUs that are 64-bit (IA-64) are the Itanium. All others (like Pentium and Xeon) are IA-32 with EM64T (also called x86-64 or sometimes x64). isn't windows xp 64bit already support EFI?? Windows XP Pro 64-bit (for x86-64) only supports BIOS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouch Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Whats the big deal with having 64bit processor - unless you want to be able to address vast amounts of memory or work with EXTREMELY large calculations - i.e nuclear physics, weather prediction etc then it offers zero advantages. In fact using 64bits where 32 will do actually DEGRADES performance of common operations. Of course there is the argument that you get increased floating point accuracy bit real programmers only use ints! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spanky Deluxe Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 Whats the big deal with having 64bit processor - unless you want to be able to address vast amounts of memory or work with EXTREMELY large calculations - i.e nuclear physics, weather prediction etc then it offers zero advantages. In fact using 64bits where 32 will do actually DEGRADES performance of common operations. Of course there is the argument that you get increased floating point accuracy bit real programmers only use ints! 64 bits isn't about extremely large numbers as much as it is about extremely accurate numbers. 64 bits involves numbers 'with more numbers'. I agree its not really a benefit to the average Joe but it is the next step. There was a time when we switched from 16 to 32 bit after all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouch Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 If your using floats more bits mean a more accurate representation. If your using ints it just means bigger. You can't increase the accuracy of an int Just because it can be done doesn't neccessarily follow that now is the right time to do it - i agree there will probably come a point when 64bit will be of use to consumers but that time certainly isn't now yet i hear people ranting about how apple are taking a step back from 64bit computing but honestly - who cares! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike St. Posted February 16, 2006 Share Posted February 16, 2006 If your using floats more bits mean a more accurate representation. If your using ints it just means bigger. You can't increase the accuracy of an int Just because it can be done doesn't neccessarily follow that now is the right time to do it - i agree there will probably come a point when 64bit will be of use to consumers but that time certainly isn't now yet i hear people ranting about how apple are taking a step back from 64bit computing but honestly - who cares! As an avid supporter of technology leaps, I take exception to your view on where we should be computer wise. 64 bit may not be what you currently need, but soon you may not have a choice based on your OEM's decisions. Because of that, the demand for the lesser processors, namely those 32 bit devices, are going to steadily dissapear and higher support for these 64 bit behemoths. I currently own a dual core athlon 64 with SSE3 and all the nine nuts. Lack of a PATA hard disk is the only obstacle to running the mac OS on it. I am fully aware the OS is 32 Bit, but WinXP isn't. I happen to like the ability to boot in 10 seconds after POST. Will be faster when I mount a 5 GIG RAM DISK to jump away from the mechanical boot speeds. But that is not the half of it. I can burn a DVD while downloading perhaps a couple dozen torrents in Azureus at full bandwidth and still have room to play Quake 4 at 1600 with 8 times anisitropic and not see so much as a hiccup. All because of the architectural difference between my previous Athlon 4000 and MSI KT400 chipset, making the leap to this new mobo and processor has shown me a whole new world of raw performance. PCI bus? What PCI bus? Oh, there is one...and I don't even make use of it. All of my PC is running through PCI express and hypertransport lanes of pure speed, my memory running at the full core speed of the processor...dual channel and screaming fast. Look at all the consoles out there...already speaking about moving to 128 bit...they were doing 64 for a long time now. For every major jump in technology, you get a little left behind. Like the days of going from 16 bit to 32 and the upset the masses had over that....well...I say, bring it on..... Incidently, all the backend improvements, like hypertransport and dual channel memory and such are not found on the 32 bit machines. The older architecture is at a brick wall because of PCI. Change is good. As for EFI.... I've worked on servers made with EFI's architecture. EFI embeds a flash ram into the mainboard. Upon installing the OS, the boot rom is copied to this flash ram which then calls for the install of the actual OS. After the OS is installed, the boot rom info is called by the BIOS of the PC. Then it fires up the command to load Darwin, which turns around and verifies the boot rom is present and matches the OS. If it doesn't find the boot rom, a kernal panic is triggered. EFI makes their own print servers and sells to many copier OEMs...Canon, Konica Minolta, Xerox and so forth that have large, high volume printer/copiers. Most of the current stuff they have all looks like bonafide PCs, except for the EFI embedded flash ram. We attempted to load the system OS onto another PC and although it went through the process of installing the boot rom and eventually the OS, the boot failed on the PC because it could not find the boot rom in flash memory. I supposed a solution of writing a boot script that created a virtual disk and copy the boot rom to that...but upon further reading, found that the boot rom itself was what was required to read the file system of the disk. This is a reprogrammable version of the parallel/comm port dongle. Microsoft is currently in cahoots with a few of the hard drive manufacturers to produce hard drives with NVRAM, sufficiently large enough to hold the OS boot image itself. The premise, to vastly decrease boot times to that of a few seconds it takes to read the RAM. Talk of Microsoft adopting EFI's technique are not by any means, idle speculation. The approach EFI made most certainly prevents anyone from mass-pirating their OS by making it a firmware issue. Companies like Dell and Gateway are interested in this tech....What Apple will do to protect their stuff will by no doubt, be similar in approach, and stands to prevent most would be hackers from actually hacking their stuff. XBox and PS2 have mod chips...but how many actual users 'mod' the box out of the millions of owners? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pflatline Posted February 28, 2006 Share Posted February 28, 2006 EFI,the extensible firmware interface is a Intel standard. It will be sold to OEMs by bios vendors such as AMI and Phoenix. More information on EFI can be found of course on Intels webste,as well as those of the major bios vendors. efi (their logo is in lowercase,so I repeat that here) is a vendor that makes RIP (raster image processor) servers to speed up printing from high end laser printers. Some years ago we purchased a Xerox color printer/copier/scanner for about 30k and had a choice of RIP servers,either one of the efi Fiery servers or a mac with a special coprocessor card on the PCI bus. (we chose the mac) EFI has been around for a long time and acording to their website appears to now make some specialized inkjet printers as well. They have nothing to do with Intel or their new firmware. (Of course now,their datasheets say they are using Intel CPUs like everyone else. 10 years ago when we were looking at them,they were based of MIPS CPUs) As for EFI.... I've worked on servers made with EFI's architecture. EFI embeds a flash ram into the mainboard. Upon installing the OS, the boot rom is copied to this flash ram which then calls for the install of the actual OS. After the OS is installed, the boot rom info is called by the BIOS of the PC. Then it fires up the command to load Darwin, which turns around and verifies the boot rom is present and matches the OS. If it doesn't find the boot rom, a kernal panic is triggered. EFI makes their own print servers and sells to many copier OEMs...Canon, Konica Minolta, Xerox and so forth that have large, high volume printer/copiers. Most of the current stuff they have all looks like bonafide PCs, except for the EFI embedded flash ram. We attempted to load the system OS onto another PC and although it went through the process of installing the boot rom and eventually the OS, the boot failed on the PC because it could not find the boot rom in flash memory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
warmcola Posted March 4, 2006 Share Posted March 4, 2006 i was under the impression that xp pro (not xp 64bit) had been patched back in service pack 1 so that if the system you were using had a 64 bit chip (like something from amd) windows would be able to treat it like a 32bit processor so that the sytem would function normally. i didnt think it would matter that the new core duo was 64. but then again i really dont understand the specifics of the architecture and the chipset. let me know if im wrong Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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