[rescue] SGI, MIPS, and IA-64

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 05:02:21PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On February 14, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > > Hopefully the IA-64 will go the way of the i860......
> > 
> > What do you mean by that?  I thought that the i860 was supposed to be good,
> > and I know that SGI used a lot of them.
> 
>   The i860 is an amazing processor, but I believe the point was that it
> failed to enter the mainstream market.
> 
>   The i860 was widely used as a high-speed embedded processor for many
> applications, not the least of which are the SGI Reality Engine (eight
> i860s for geometric stuff) and Reality Engine 2 (twelve i860s).  It
> failed as a mainstream processor, however, primarily because it is
> very difficult to program with any degree of efficiency.

Well, so far the ia-64 certainly isn't entering the mainstream.  What do you 
think of this chip anyway?  It appears to be decent.

Unlike the i860 or the 3210, it looks like the ia-64 should be easy to have
excelent optimizing compilers for.

I recently noticed that it does register windowing, which I never new before.
That does start to make 128general registers look kinda small though.  
I think the bundles are cool (a bundle has 3 41bit instructions in them, which
are guaranteed to execute simultaneously, to my understanding), plus for the
most part it looks like IA-64 can execute 2 bundles at once (meaning 6 parallel
instructions).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd