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Linus Has Harsh Words For Itanium
Anonymous Coward writes "As a follow up to the earlier story "Intel: No Rush to 64-bit Desktop"... In words that Intel are likely to be far from happy with, the Finnish luminary has stuck the boot into Itanium. His responses to some questions on processor architecture are sure to be music to AMD's ears. Linus, in an Inquirer interview concludes: "Code size matters. Price matters. Real world matters. And ia-64... falls flat on its face on ALL of these."" Of course, Linus works for a chip maker ;)
"but speaking strictly from the technological point of view"
I think that was his point. It's great technically but it sucks in the real world. If its not practical its a shitty architecture IMHO.
I also think the x86-64 is a more viable solution as well.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Linus isn't saying he won't let it in. He's simply saying that the thinks it's not a good arch based on technical merit. He'll let it in. He never said he wouldn't. He's just saying he doesn't like the way the chip was designed (what choices they made, etc).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
What are YOU smoking?
Optimizations done at compile time are far better than optimizations done at runtime. At compile time, more is known about the structure of the program, where the flow of the program will be going, and more time intensive optimizations can be done than ones done in realtime in the cpu.
Itanium is slower right now, but as compilers with optimizations tailored to it come out, it has the potential to kick every RISC processor's ass. The reason for this is that RISC processors are bogged down by doing the optimizations at runtime that Itanium doesn't have to care about. This means the Itanium will have the same or less stalls and more efficient use of the processor.
Go read up on compiler optimizations to see why cutting out the middleman of instruction sets is a good thing.