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Raymond Chen recently posted a ten-part introduction to the ia64 architecture. Rapidly teaching me that while I might be able to write a brainfuck to perl compiler in a few minutes, there's no way in a million years that I'll ever be able to write a good compiler that targets ia64.
- Part 1: Warming up
- Part 2: Instruction encoding, templates, and stops
- Part 3: The Windows calling convention, how parameters are passed
- Part 3b: How does spilling actually work?
- Part 4: The Windows calling convention, leaf functions
- Part 5: The GP register, calling functions, and function pointers
- Part 6: Calculating conditionals
- Part 7: Speculative loads
- Part 8: Advanced loads
- Part 9: Counted loops and loop pipelining
- Part 10: Register rotation
The Itanium is a 64-bit EPIC architecture. EPIC stands for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, a design in which work is offloaded from the processor to the compiler. For example, the compiler decides which operations can be safely performed in parallel and which memory fetches can be productively speculated. This relieves the processor from having to make these decisions on the fly, thereby allowing it to focus on the real work of processing.
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:07AM
AMD shares a fair bit of the blame for their problems.
I bought AMD when back when they first did the AMD64/opteron/Athlon64 stuff and were clearly better in many ways (except for that TSC timing issue). And I think very many others bought those too.
But after that they seemed to rest on their laurels and later produced rather crappy stuff:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/10/can-amd-survive-bulldozers-disappointing-debut/ [arstechnica.com]
"Indeed, in some tests, Bulldozer can't even keep up with its predecessor. The launch of the Phenom in 2007 was similarly underwhelming—it arrived late, broken, and slow—but AMD managed to turn things around with Phenom II to produce a viable competitor to many of Intel's processors."
So given the crap they were churning out if you weren't a fanboy it didn't take any antitrust action from Intel for you to prefer Intel instead of AMD.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday August 09 2015, @02:17PM
It's not a matter of being a fanboy, there were numerous points along the way where AMD was ahead and was unable to get much benefit from it due to antitrust laws being broken by the competition.
Bulldozer was unfortunate, but you're failing to account for how revolutionary they're goal was. I had the previous chip and it kicked the teeth out of what Intel was doing at the time. Even now, Intel depends on fixed benchmarks to keep their lower end chips looking like they're keeping up.
(Score: 2) by albert on Sunday August 09 2015, @04:16PM
There was no way AMD could produce enough chips. They'd have had to outsource production.