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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (112551)	10/5/2000 6:38:25 PM
From: EricRR	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Thanks Tench, that does clear some things up for me. Still though- Cache structure and pipeline lengths may change, but that doesn't require new compilers. The number of architected registers cannot change without extensions to the instruction set, and I'm not sure whether McKinley adds any new instructions or not. And the number of execution units may change, but the compiler is still only responsible for putting independent IA-64 instructions in bundles of three. It's up to the processor to unbundle the instructions and dynamically dispatch them to available execution units. It seems that the original alleged benefit of EPIC was to get rid of all the logic required for "newer" processor to emulate and "older" instruction set. So if new registers or execution units appear, then, either all that control logic needs to return in order to ensure backward compatibility, or, the newer processor contains the older processor as a sub unit, and any old executables ignore the new logic. I just don't see how there can be a "clean" break between binaries and microarchecture in EPIC, without a dynamic binary translator like Dynamo.