[geeks] Carly's Gone!!!

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Jochen Kunz wrote:

> > imho they're in way too deep to back out of itanic.
> Yes, I am frightened they are.

Most of the architects and VLSI folks seem to have been sold to Intel, so
pretty much HP as a processor maker is a thing of the past, as sad as it
sounds.

> > that's not to say i don't think -this- chip isn't a colossal mistake.
> > is it actually showing -any- of the claimed promise?
> Well. It is 64 bit? ;-)

Itanium2 is a decent performer, in fact for floating point intensive stuff
its only real competition comes from IBM. So it is not that bad of a chip
really...

> >From what I heared one problem with Itanic is the need for exorbitant
> high memory bandwith. That is the reason why intel put huge (and thus
> expensive) caches on the chip.

Well that is the same problem with almost any new CPU isn't it? Ironically
enough CISC designs seem to keep up with the RISC/VLWI folks because
almost everyone ignored the much lower instruction bandwidth needed by
assuming that memories would keep up with processors (which sort of did in
the early 80s when RISC came in force).

> Then think of the things that where invented on / for Alpha and that are
> now soled by intel (HyperThreading) and AMD (HyperTransport).

To be fair neither SMT nor differential high speed serial channels were
invented because of alpha.