Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

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I don't have stocks in either companies, but I can see why a Xilinx stockholder might object.

From the AMD side of things, it's just expanding their offerings, and maybe bringing in some know-how and technologies that could help boost/extend their existing products.

If you have Xilinx stocks because you believe in what they're doing and predicting a bright future and possible dividend while at the same time don't see much of a future in the AMD64 platform, then why would you want AMD to the company.

Most stockholders don't care about the companies they invest in any more. It doesn't matter if they make FPGAs, cars or toaster ovens. What matters is that you can make a profit buying a stock now and selling it at a higher place down the road. Those kinds of stockholder won't block an AMD takeover if the price is right.

> What matters is that you can make a profit buying a stock now and selling it at a higher place down the road.

Making a profit has been the point of buying and selling stocks literally since day one, when the Dutch East India Company issued publicly tradeable shares in 1602.

If you want to show your support for the vision of a company, buy their t-shirts. If you're buying their shares (typically not even from the company itself, but from another shareholder) for that reason, you're doing it wrong.

amd64 isn't going away any time soon. Intel is still the largest player here. If I were Intel right now, I'd be trying to come up with the next iteration of x86, probably 256 bit.

> 256 bit

but, why? do we need more than 16 exabytes of memory?

Right. Does anyone even need a megabyte? As Bill Gates famously (didn’t) say, “640k ought to be enough for anybody”.

Joking aside, we very well may one day have more memory available that 64 address lines can handle. RISC-V’s spec does have a stub chapter for “RV128”

There don’t seem to be many advantages to words larger that 64 IMO (they do exist, but things like GMP exist for that). If the purpose would be parallel processing (a la SIMD), we already have “256 bit x86” with AVX2. IIRC, Intel’s x86 chips can process 256 bits of integer data at the same time. And if you want 512 bits, AVX-512 exists as well (but it’s implemented internally as two sequences of 256 bit data)

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