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Raymond chen on itanium / ia64
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 [msdn.com]
Part 2 [msdn.com]
Part 3 [msdn.com]
Part 3b [msdn.com]
Part 4 [msdn.com]
Part 5 [msdn.com]
Part 6 [msdn.com]
Part 7 [msdn.com]
Part 8 [msdn.com]
Part 9 [msdn.com]
Part 10 [msdn.com]
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.
