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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: Joe NYC who wrote (96146)3/1/2000 6:59:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu  Read Replies (2) of 1576619
 
Jozef, <Isn't this one area where Itanium may have an advantage, in that you pack several instructions into one 64 bit chunk of data?>

In IA-64, three instructions are packed into one 128-bit chunk.

Scumbria does have a valid concern regarding code bloat. Unlike CISC or even RISC, IA-64 instructions always come in packs of threes, and each instruction cannot depend on the results of the other two. That means if you have a piece of code that does not allow for instruction-level parallelism, that means only one instruction can be inserted into each 128-bit chunk. The resulting worst-case scenario would be an increase in code size by a factor of three.

On the other hand, I have to wonder whether code bloat really does become an issue in the real-world. I guess that's yet another reason why the compiler has to be good, not only to increase the number of instructions executed per clock, but also to pack as many instructions as possible into a given amount of space. And certainly the issue of compilers has been a touchy one when it comes to Itanium's potential performance.

Tenchusatsu
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