InfoWorld: Itanium is "a compiler's dream date"

From: Keith Parris (keithparris_NOSPAM_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/20/05 

Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:06:29 GMT

 From InfoWorld, Sept. 7, 2005:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/07/37OPcurve_1.html

The CPU’s next 20 years

The compiler is the processor of the future, and the IA-64 is a
compiler’s dream date

Ahead of the Curve
By Tom Yager, September 7, 2005

With great respect, you probably won’t be deciding the outcome of the
CPU race; not if your normal shopping list has called for
backward-compatible, x86 systems (25 percent faster than the previous
years’ models) at about the same cost.

No offense, but you’re not the one who hires technologists to analyze
CPU trends and plan four horizons ahead. That task goes to AMD, IBM,
Intel, Sun, and other chipmakers. When AMD cast its mind (named Fred
Weber) beyond, it saw its clean room x86 trimmed back to its core and
built into a shockingly well-designed machine. When IBM looked ahead, it
saw ever more powerful Power and PowerPCs. When Sun looked ahead ...
well, who knows what Sun saw?

When Intel set its gurus to work, they saw Itanium. The world laughed at
this processor that Intel could not describe in understandable language.
The only things clear to all were that that Itanium was incompatible
with everything else and it didn’t have as many gigahertz as Xeon.

Itanium and its progeny, known as IA-64 on Intel’s family tree, embody
the right idea. IA-64 makes what Intel is doing now with x64 seem like a
waste of time and money. How can one say this about the king of market
share? Shouldn’t Intel be in there fighting to win its honor back from AMD?

Honor, schmonor. Intel’s got the volume business and it’ll keep it until
x64 is relegated to digital watches. Chalk up the win, we say, quit
brooding, and start planning for next season.

The time is right for IA-64 because, except for the AMD hitch, the
future played out precisely as Intel planned. We are coming to a place
where instruction sets, pipelines, RISC, and CISC don’t matter. Intel
rolled out the original Itanium as “the processor for the next 20 years.”

Almost. The compiler is the processor for the next 20 years, and IA-64
is a compiler’s dream date. IA-64 is exactly what we need ... The future
belongs to processors that are essentially big clusters of logic gates
that switch very, very rapidly. It doesn’t matter that a CPU like this
is almost impossible to code to, because, as Intel saw so long ago,
almost nobody writes in machine language any more.

The road ahead isn’t about 8GHz Xeons or 32-core Opterons. ...

I’m bullish on IA-64 because a dream world of compilers that take their
sweet time to build and optimize but that produce mind-blowing code will
surface there first."
...

Relevant Pages

  • Re: IA64 and emulator performance
    ... Although I thought Intel had patented EPIC, ... The claim may be based in the fact that IA-64 ... However, Itanium proved to have minimal benefits for desktop CAD, ... People with supercomputing problems that fit really well onto Itanium, ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Marketing names (Re: Hinted conditional branch ?)
    ... A marketing name of IA-64. ... Architecture, and Itanium Processor. ... Sure Intel uses the names marketing has decreed until marketing ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Re: AMD64 sales figures
    ... > really have no idea whether it does or does not apply to HP or IBM Intel ... Why Intel's Prescott will use AMD64 extensions ... ONE OF THE the biggest stories out of the AMD launch comes not from AMD itself, ... Taking windoz boxes out of the picture, what's left for IA-64? ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: HP should....
    ... If Intel has begn to ... > revenus are not impressive and rumour tha the only reason Intel is ... nose to do away with any contracts, ... Intel is continuing IA-64 for the same reasons as before, ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • what IA-32, IA-64 and intel 64 are
    ... I'd like to ask what IA-32, IA-64 and intel 64 are. ... Are they related to compiler? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)