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To: wanna_bmw who wrote (59360)	10/19/2001 5:07:32 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

"What the article fails to really get into is that Wen-Mei had a lot of optimism for future IA-64 compilers" There is likely a basis for that optimism. And who knows, maybe that optimism is well placed. But so far, history has shown that it is harder to optimize the compilers than it is to throw transistors at the problem. Sure, the compiler work pays off, but it also pays off on the hardware solutions too. A driving force behind EPIC was that out of order processing was going to be too difficult and wasn't going to yield enough benefit to be worthwhile. A solution to the problem, as it has been a potential solution for 20 years, was to go VLIW. EPIC was going to solve the problems that killed previous attempts at VLIW, and promising new compiler technology was going to be the lynch pin. So will Itanium be the future? I am dubious, if only because any architecture that has been worked on for close to a decade before it manages to ship, and then with only limited performance, has a serious uphill battle on it's hands. By the time that the 2nd or 3rd generation is out, the other chips out there will have advanced also. Ok, it won't have to worry about EV8 now, but the next gen. Power4 or AMD Dog series should be out there. A Hammer with a revised core and SMT (assuming that is what is in the next gen. Hammer) would be a formidable competitor to future Itaniums...

To: wanna_bmw who wrote (59360)	10/20/2001 4:04:18 PM
From: dumbmoney	Respond to of 275872

If IA-64 really can fix the majority of micro-architectural performance issues in just 2 or 3 generations, then it can easily become the world's most powerful microprocessor in the next few years, and that would certainly be worth the long development and high costs to get to this point. I wonder. The world's most powerful microprocessor for the last 8 years or so (Alpha) died for lack of sales. Meanwhile one of the slowest CPUs around, SPARC, is doing great. And of course, the despised and villified x86 is doing better than ever in the performance race - contrary to the naysayers, the "Intel penalty" is shrinking rather than increasing.