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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles R who wrote (67443)	8/3/1999 12:15:00 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 1574262

Re: I would be looking forward to ANY info on this topic Go to www.byte.com and search on VLIW Look for: "Intel and HP hope to speed CPUs with VLIW technology that's riskier than RISC" by Dick Pountain Here's a sample: ------------------------------------------------------------ VLIW: Hardware plus Software VLIW represents the ultimate of internal parallelism in microprocessor designs. You can do two things to make a microprocessor run faster: Speed up its clock or make it perform more operations during each clock cycle. Speeding up the clock requires inventing ever-faster (read: smaller)fabrication processes and adopting architectural features such as deep pipelines to keep the silicon busy. Performing more operations per cycle means both building multiple function units on the same chip as well as executing enough instructions concurrently--and safely--to keep those units busy. ------------------------------------------------------------------- The theory is great - they should be commended for what they are trying to do. But it hasn't worked out yet, and it's starting to look a little like iAPX432 (an earlier "great leap forward" that stumbled). If AMD just makes 64 bit registers available to allow for faster data moves, and 64 bit addresses to allow for larger memory spaces, they should gain "the 64 bit advantage" without the risk (or potential gain) that has resulted from attempting to implement VLIW in Merced.

To: Charles R who wrote (67443)	8/3/1999 1:51:00 AM
From: dumbmoney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574262

The big difference vis-a-vis IA-64 is that one doesn't need to recreate the whole software base - i.e., it can take off like a rocket! This is a huge roadmap thing - doesn't have much to do with near term dollars for AMD but has everything to do with where it is headed as a company. Something with the potential to move AMD from a trading stock to a long-term investment-grade stock. I've said before that a 64-bit extension of x86 makes a lot of sense (or will in a few years when 4GB of memory is common) as a means to extend the life of x86 indefinitely. If Intel doesn't do it (due to IA64 politics or whatever), then AMD should. Whether AMD is actually considering it or not, I have no idea.