Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Gryba who wrote (78629)	4/28/2002 3:38:23 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Constantine, Re: "Maybe I am wrong and VLIW will turn out to be far superior to CISC and RISC." Well, at least you're keeping your mind open to the possibility. I may be wrong, also. It's all just speculation. I simply refuse to believe the 'Droid theory, which is that Intel merely hangs on to a IA-64 as a loser architecture, because either A) they are afraid of litigation from customer currently engrossed in development costs, or B) they don't want to lose any more face to the industry. I think that Intel sees Itanium as instrumental in gaining share vs Sun, one of their top two competitors. Commodity x86 processors are malsuited in winning mind share amongst deep routed Sun customers, but a custom 64-bit architecture might stand a chance. At the very least, it represents an architecture that can be built with a whole different level of specifications in mind. Features still take up silicon, and there is only so much real estate to go around, even at the current levels of manufacturing. Given a larger power envelope and larger die area, a designer can include all kinds of features that wouldn't normally "fit" in a desktop part. Itanium allows this kind of design consideration. Also don't forget the architectural advantages: no decode stage required, large register file available, etc. I think from this time forward, IA-64 will start to diverge from IA-32, becoming more powerful with each new generation. It explains why Intel continues to dump huge R&D into it, with four cores currently planned to launch in the next two years (McKinley, Madison, Deerfield, and Montecito). Each of these take many resources. The pipeline is now filled. Once it empties out, I think the results will be pleasantly surprising. But like you, I admit that I could be wrong. wbmw