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.
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:19AM
The problem with itanic is that it's a scaled up DSP. It's only good for executing FORTRAN loops.
From what I saw it was very good at "embarrassingly parallel workloads" and not really good at other stuff.
The problem with that was it was very expensive and power hungry, and embarrassingly parallel workloads are also easily run on multiple AMD64 CPUs/nodes (which were cheaper and performed better when you got messier workloads). For the price of one of those HP Itanic servers you could buy two or more AMD64 machines and do that parallel workload faster.
Thus the Itanic only made sense for a few people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:43AM
I knew a Debian guy who had an itanic server for doing the itanic build. He used to use the waste heat for drying his clothes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @02:16PM