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Intel's Itanium Will Get x86 Emulation
pissoncutler writes "Intel has announced that they will be releasing a software emulation product to allow 32-bit x86 apps to run on Itanium Processors.
According to these stories (story 1, story 2), the emulator is capable of the x86 performance of a 1.5Ghz Xeon (when run on a similar speed Itanium.) Who said that no one cared about x86 anymore?"
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=03/04/23/1 82250&cid=3
First off, the disclaimer: this is my pet theory, i.e., a total, wild, pulled-of-out-my-*ss speculation, okay. I have no inside info or contact with people who might know this, but here is my speculation of why this AMD thing keeps coming up despite the fact that the use of the IBM 970 is almost a certainty.
Put this AMD thing into a bigger context of recent events.
We've heard that 10.3 will include a more integrated Classic environment where Classic Mac OS apps will be given many of the benefits of Aqua.
Apple quietly releases their implementation of XWindows system, X11. Despite the fact that this news set Slashdot buzzing for days on end and probably should have had some mention from Steve Jobs in the keynote he'd given a few days prior, it was released very quietly. Interesting.
Next, the somewhat unexpected news that Microsoft was buying Virtual PC. What on earth could Microsoft want with VPC? We can speculate that they want greater control over emulation of Windows on the Mac, but that sounds weak. They still control the operating system that gets installed on VPC so from that perspective they've gained nothing by buying out VPC.
And then these weird, peristent, inexplicable rumors that Apple is in talks with AMD about something or other. Who knows what. It's very doubtful that it's about a chip that would replace the PPC since we've read many, many well-informed examinations of such a move and the technical hurdles would likely ruin Apple.
So what could all this possibly point to? Apple has given us a system that can basically run software from three different operating systems: the classic Mac OS, Mas OS X (the Next OS), and Unix. They recently brought the Unix world closer with the release of X11. Wouldn't it be amazing if hardware in the near-future included an "add-on" chip (something like Altivec that works in conjuction with the PPC processor) that emulated the x86 hardware? Maybe it would give Mac users the ability to run Windows and PC software, not via software emulation, but with hardware assistance. Imagine the interest Apple could draw if they presented the world with a machine that runs the Classic, OS X, Unix and Windows applications... all in one environment and almost seamlessly.
Now does Microsoft buying VPC make sense? Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe MS Mac Business Unit caught wind of this and wants to one-up Apple somehow. Any thoughts?
AMD would be a likely partner is such a move since one could imagine the problems with Intel assisting Apple with this. If it was popular, Intel would be killing their own business. AMD, on the other hand, wouldn't, if I understand the situation correctly.
Anyway... like I said... wild speculation, but that's what all this says to me.
If Apple can control the hardware on which it will run, an Opteron doesn't seem too out of the question. Running an opteron != Apple on PC board/hardware.
The party's over
If we do, I think it would probably be only for a brief transition period, like when they switched from the 68K line of processors to PPC. But who knows. I really hope they don't switch to AMD, that would make people less inclined to write software that is still compatible with the PPC architecture I own (assuming they don't make binaries compatible with both... i don't think they can, can they?).
today is spelling optional day.
For those of us wanting to get away from Windows, but feel Linux is still not ready for the desktop yet, this might make Apple a more viable alternative.
You forgot "and have the extra cash". Lets face it. The only reason I haven't gotten myself an iMac, is because I don't have the extra grand or so to buy one.
Now if AMD jumps into the mix, things may get interesting...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
It's not exactly Mac OS X, but it's the Darwin core -- http://www.gnu-darwin.org.
Apple did make an "x86-compatible" Mac a few years back, I think it had a 486 chip alongside the PPC (or even 040?) I don't remember too much about this, I think it worked by pressing Cmd-return, at which point it would switch to the 486, while maintaining state on the PPC. Essentially like the Orange Micro PC compatibility cards they used to make. (NuBus what!)
I'd love to see an Apple/AMD collaboration, either a licensed port of the whole Mac OS X to x86 architecture, or a dual-processor machine. It'd be pretty badass.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
I am a little ignorant on this, so please enlighten me. Can instructions for the PowerPC 970 be migrated to the Power4 chips without too much trouble? The point being, is there the prospect that Apple will put the Power4s in some new, really high end Xserves?
If so, that could let Apple break out of just the 1U market and compete with 2U and 4U servers with more than just two processors.
Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is growing.
Remember, Motorola didn't even release the PowerPC 7400 (G4), much less any information about it, until apple introduced the Power Mac G4. Does that mean it didn't exist?
Apple probably can't play those same kind of "keep it secret until we announce our product" games with IBM, but keep in mind the only thing IBM has really done was introduce the concept for the processor at MPF. Judging from how Apple has rolled out new processors in the past, it wouldn't be surprising to find if further information about the 970 is being withheld at Apple's request (Apple being a potentially huge customer for this chip).
Also, remember that before CeBIT, IBM posted press releases on its German site talking about 970, the fact that it featured AltiVec, and how IBM was going to be demoing several 970-based blade servers at CeBIT. The press release suddenly got pulled and there was no further information about the 970 from IBM.
One way this could be interpreted is that the 970 is vaporware.
The more likely scenario, however, based on how apple has done releases of new processors in the past, including several iterations of the 7400 family, is that more information is being withheld until Apple releases a system featuring this processor. Then the floodgates will open.
The only reason we may know anything of it at all is that IBM felt it fundamentally important enough to present at MPF - we haven't heard a peep since.
While it's extremely unlikely that Apple would pursue two completely different platforms at the same time, I think we would be most likely to see different processors in different markets, i.e. the 970 in the consumer line, the Opteron in the server line, or some division like that.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Actually I believe that the complete opposite is true. Apples market share could go up 10x overnight if they released Mac OSX for x86. Hardware is a tough place to make money, the hardware COSTS money. Lost of it, profit margins are slim.
And even if Apple made the OS free-standing for any x86 machine, that would not stop Apple from being able to build ultra-stylish, high-priced, boutique x86 machines and put their own OS on it now would it? They'd probably sell exactly the same # of machines that way as the die hard Apple aficinados would probably still prefer to buy apple branded machines, AND it would grow their OS market share tremendously, maybe even driving their branded machine sales higher in the future.
Frankly I think not porting OSX to x86 was a huge blunder that will hold the company back another 5 years till the next actual achetecture change is forced upon them.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
even if Apple doesn't move to x86(which would, IMO, make them either the next M$ or dead), why can't the OSS community make a comparable variant? I mean, the whole Cocoa app structure is built to the OPENSTEP standard, with some whizbang additions. Why we start with GNUstep and make a source-compatible version using the Linux kernel? I mean, it would be fairly easy, much easier than cloning Windoze 'cause the groundwork is already done(again, GNUstep & WindowMaker).
I think it was back in '95 or '96. IBM and Motorola were in development of dual-platform supporting processor called CHRP or Common Hardware Reference Platform.
The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) Specification describes a family of machines based on the PowerPC(tm) processor that are capable of booting multiple operating systems including Mac OS, Windows NT, AIX® and Solaris(tm).
Wouldn't that have been cool? What ever happened to that idea? Here's the old documentation.
It appears that IBM has some information on their site that is still recent, dated Sept. 2002. Weird. I'd love to have one of those machines. PowerPC 970? Forget about it.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Apple need another supplier so they limit their risk. They maybe getting AMD to fab a PowerPC type chip.
Alternatively....
Maybe they are just going to use AMD64 chips to build 8 and 4 way XServes?
NeXT used to have fat binaries compatibility across NeXT Black hardware, Intel, Sun, HP and Alpha.
Anthony
I have a better reason: AMD can fab those CPUS easily and IBM has better things to do than fab chips for Macs. Apple needs to make sure it doesn't have to stop the assembly line for IBM to fab more CPUs. My guess is that Apple will have AMD produce IBM 970 chips alongside IBM. IBM probably doesn't want to be the first in line for Macintosh CPUs, there's not enough money in it for a multi-faceted operation like IBM. AMD can produce ample chips and they might be able to make a profit doing it.
This has nothing to do with Macs and x86, AMD produces a LOT more than just athlon chips, they'll be pumping out AMD-970s with their extra capacity.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The phrase "not ready for the desktop yet" is a meaningless mantra mumbled by people who obviously haven't used linux and its BSD bretheren lately. I use Doze(TM) in the office and BSD otherwise, and lately it seems that Doze(TM) is the OS that's not ready for the desktop. Tried OS/x too. Yeah, it's almost ready, but too emphatic about being proprietary.
Steve has taken Pixar out of the DRM consortium publically even when Disney threw a fit over the issue. Apple is about the only major hardware vendor not a member of the TCPA.
Sticking with the PPC 970 gives Apple an easy way to maintain backward compatability for its current market of folk unable to break their addiction to legacy, non-native Mac software.
Moving to an AMD or Intel chip gives Apple an easy way to attract the business users looking for cutting edge innovation like 64-bit compatability and a Unix based OS.
My guess is that because they'll have two well defined audiences, that won't overlap it would be right up Apple's alley to do both. Here's our line of computers for the "Classic" mac crowd unable to leave Quark 4 and PixelPaint. But here's our line of cutting-edge, Classic-free boxes that you can order with your choice of AMD or Intel chip inside.
The wilder rumors of a "Classic" like environment on AMD or Intel processors may have a bit of truth, but they're anxious to ditch the Mac legacy crap so if anything it'd be a Classic environment designed to boot your copy of Windows, OS/2, or other legacy 80x86 OS. I still don't believe them, but once you dump the Mac legacy stuff, moving to a different processor is much simpler.
Yes, this makes far more sense - the AMD exec may consider Opteron and HyperTransport to be integral technologies designed with each other in mind. He may have thought the reporter was asking specifically about the Opteron with regards to the Tier 1 comment, and the exec responded with an admission of work on the HT project, with nothing to do with Opteron.
As for the speculation - I doubt Apple is going to switch to Opteron. The PowerPC 970 will be the easiest transition to current performance hardware that could hope for, and is "good enough" to Opteron performance that the minimal gain would be received at a tremendous cost and hassle and potential risk ot the company. Highly unlikely. We already know that Apple has plans for the 970 by reading the Asian newspapers and tech websites
On the other hand, how about emulation? Microsoft bought Connectix for a reason, but what isn't widely discussed is talk of new emulation technology that may potentially find itself into Connectix products that would have revealed a dramatic rise in Windows emulation performance. Who knows what might have been, but certainly Connectix is the kind of company that would have investigated this, out of business interest.
Did Microsoft squash a technology that would have made Windows on the Mac "good enough"? That would be an interesting question to try and solve. We've all heard by now they're paying id waste money to prevent id from releasing Doom 3 into our hands, does it surprise us that they specifically act to squash new products? I've heard another company has access to the same technology.
Whatever the case, the remainder of 2003 should be very interesting to Apple.
I know smaller die fabs allow for cooler chips etc, until you start filling everything in with more transistors etc.
.13micron process could you make a very cool running chip as compared to the P4's?
If you produced a Pentium 1 core or even a 2 using a
Just something I never figured out. Thanks for any replies.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Yes, it IS for desktop computers. To read the spec:
IBM PowerPC -- In the Hand, On the Desk,
and Everywhere else
Lisa Su
Director, PowerPC and Emerging Products
PowerPC 970 is the first in a family of new 9xx 64-bit Microprocessors
Key Features:
Based on award-winning Power4 technology
Up to 1.8 GHz
Proven 64-bit microprocessor architecture with native
32-bit application compatibility
Up to 6.4 GB/s system interface
Implements SIMD coprocessor
Full Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) support
Target Applications
64-bit Linux Applications
Desktop/Workstation
Entry Server
See where it says "Target applications: Desktop?"
http://www.ibm.com/jp/chips/forum0/pdf/05.pdf
I think you mean MacOS X's market share, not Apple-branded computers. In any case, why would it?
Is it because of the iApplications? Well, a Windows user needs to throw away all his old apps and pay $130 to get them. I think most switchers see them as a nice bonus, but not a primary factor.
Is it because of Mac-only applications? I think we can safely rule that out.
Is it because of a Unix core? Since Linux hasn't exactly ruled the world yet, I think we can rule that out, too.
Is it because of Aqua? Possibly, but think about losing all your apps.
Is it because OS X can comfortably dual boot with Windows? Oops, it can't. First Apple will need to support VFAT and NTFS, then write HFS drivers for Windows.
So who exactly will buy these things? People who always wanted to run Unix on the desktop, can't afford a (used) Mac, and can't figure Linux out? They also have to somehow afford OS X and repurchase all their old apps. Ten times, overnight, you said?
Personally, I doubt even the "I'd switch if only" subset of Slashdot would, but that's because I'm cynical. I'd like to see where you got your projections, though.
That's not a fair assertion. I don't feel Linux is ready for the desktop either, but I also miss some of the flexibility it gave me now(I replaced my Dell with an iBook). I liked the way I had my Gnome desktop set up, I liked KDE, I liked a lot of the applications. But then you had the dependency chasing to deal with, fucking with fonts to get thinks looking decent, the inability to copy and paste between some apps, little things like that. I believe linux is very close to being a great desktop, but it's not quite there. OS X gives me much of what linux did, but also a GUI I don't have to fuck with, and that's why I am on OS X.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
Except that the instruction decode unit is a modular part of AMD's chip offerings... As in, the AMD chips execute their own native sub-instruction internal code, and they have a programmable front-end to translate the x86 stuff. If you wanted a PPC chip from AMD, Apple would only have to give them the specs, and EXISTING AMD chip cores could be quickly (software) adapted to execute PPC machine code.
All that's left is the pinouts and power/heat-dissipation requirements to sort out. The AltiVec is another side issue, to which I'm sure AMD would gladly offer a next-gen solution...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
For Windows/Mac OS X, most software is binary-only, and companies are going to decide that it's not worth the effort of supporting processor X, when it only has a fraction of the users. So, which ever gains popularity will be the defacto only system to use, and users of the other will be out of luck.
Which is exactly why I said Apple on AMD, if it ever occured, would be on the server side, where the source is available because most is open source. Apple ships Apache with OS X, for example. Porting over the other server applications would likely come from the open source community. Apple would have to port over OS X, which is not trivial but since it is BSD it would be more portable than windows by a long shot. Porting the applications afterward would be much easier.
Keep in mind, Apple has gotten pretty serious about the server market lately. Their offerings NOW are decent for many applications. This would give apple a 64 bit server, with backward compatability for existing 32bit applications. This is one way to get into serving huge databases. Of course the 970 will offer similar capability, but is actually designed to be a desktop cpu, not server. The Power4 cpu, the big brother of the 970, is designed for server use. This would make the AMD cpus capable of mulitboot Linux/OS X/Windows more easily. It may also give better performance for Windows apps running on top of OS X.
I am not necessarily EXPECTING this to happen, but Apple has a better chance of developing a specialized OS for servers on a different CPU than Microsoft. If memory serves me correct, MS gave up support for other CPUs a version to two back. Its all wild speculation, but interesting possibilities exist. Remember, the OS X kernel has been opened up in the OpenDarwin project, so OSS programmers may be helping with the dirty work.
As to the users being more advanced: If you port the kernel on top of any cpu, and put aqua on top of it, or X11, which Apple is also involved in, then how geeky you are is not longer a factor.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Sounds like a defensive reaction to the release of the Opteron. If AMD is offering a 64-bit chip with support for full-speed 32-bit x86 software, then Intel has to have a competitive answer *before* industry adopts the AMD64 over IA-64 for future migration.
Peace and love, y'all
Is it really emulation or does it convert x86 assembly so it can run on the Itanium? If you can get 1.5ghz worth of performance out of EMULATION on the Itanium, then I need a new processor.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
The Itanium had a lot of good ideas, but no matter how much you want to drop an old architecture and start over from scratch like the goal of that project was, you've got to provide a transition period. Athlon's doing this with the Opteron, Apple is doing this with OS X using the Carbon Toolkit, etc etc. The *key* to getting a user base to switch from an older architecture to a newer one has to be a compatability layer.
Perhaps that is what doomed Itanium 1 to failure form the start. (Well that combined with the horrible heat output and power consuption of the Itanium 1).
- tristan
Code in
Itanium seems to be a nitch chip in which it can do certain things like scientific apps which can be compilied in parrallel really fast but it sucks at anything else.
http://saveie6.com/
Also, it's worth noting that Itanium has always supported running x86 software without emulation. It just turns out their hardware implementation is slower than emulating the same thing in 64-bit IA-64 mode.
Peace and love, y'all
Actually, there is no reason that a hacker from the Free Software Foundation could not write a simply IA-32 emulator for the IBM PPC 970. Are there any takers?
Sun, however, will not be able to do the same because the implementation of the UltraSPARC III is rather poor. Its IA-32 emulation performance would be worse than a 80486.
I'd wager that this is FX32! (allowed you to do the same on Alpha) reworked for the Itanium. Considering Intel purchased all Alpha related technology I would n't be surprised. This is not really that bad a thing since FX32 was quite good at what it did (within its limits).
vmware, bochs, virtualpc.
Is this modded as +4 100% interesting???
Why why why?
Pity there is no -1 100% wrong choice huh?
IMHO, the software emulator is a better long-term solution. A hardware emulator uses some power even if you're not using it and drives up the cost of the chips by taking up realestate and increasing the defect rate. Your design-test cycle is also much faster for a software solution. There's also the marketing point of "we're doing this well so far, and will give you an even better version when it comes out, for free". They can't easily upgrade hardware for free at a later date. The software emulator probably has a lot of overlap with the compiler group, so you might get compiler research almost for free.
Also, I assume most of the guys writing the software emulator aren't experts in hardware design and vice-versa. The two projects are completely independent and likely don't steal personell from eachother.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
So now Intel's Itanium is the exact same as Transmeta's Crusoe processors when running x86. Except Intel exposes the VLIW part of the chip.
And they call it EPIC instead of VLIW. This emulation can be pretty good. Transmeta was able to beat all native x86 chips when it first came out, and their manfacturing plants presumably weren't as nicely tuned as Intel and AMD's.
This should make it "trivial" for Itanium to also support x86-64/AMD64 if they wanted to "show how much more effecient Intel64 is".
Does this have anything *directly* in common with FX!32 I wonder?
Whatever happens, even if the Opteron was 100% full backwards compatible and 2x faster than Itanium, nobody in the server segment or even the high end workstation segment will buy an Opteron because they think that AMD makes unstable cheap processors targetted at the nerdy overclocking enthusiast.
I personnally don't agree, but my opinion isn't worth jack inside the corporation and I already know the system's administrator has a "Intel Inside" sticker on his forehead, even if the chips cost 2x as much. They say they pay for "quality". Psssh, what a load of bull.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
From what I've seen, I would argue that their motive is the latter. Intel has show on several occasions that, these days, they simply don't give a damn about the end user. They care about market share, profits, and their precious stock price. Let's not forget the fact that "Pentium" was coined because Intel wasn't allowed to trademark the number 586.
Remember when they released an overclocked Pentium III to the public, and Tom's Hardware had that nice little article exposing it for the failure it was? It choked on GCC, among other things, while Intel steadfastly denied the problem. Then they actually recalled the processors. Competition at the expense of the end user... wonderful!
It is clear AMD is still going to come out on top in performance on this one, unless "software emulation" doesn't mean what I think it means. It is also clear to me that Intel has to do a lot more than throw some software emulation at an issue before I ever buy another Intel processor.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I don't think so.
I had read multiple rumors about Intel having something up their bunny-suited sleeves, but most of these rumors had Intel supporting x86-64 -- that is -- copying AMD for the first time. This announcement takes away one of the unique advantages of the Opteron/Athlon64 without following AMD's lead.
If you think running 32-bit code half as fast (1.5 GHz. Xeon vs. 2.8 GHz. Xeon) on a processor that costs four times as much takes away any advantage you're confused.
To me it looks like Opteron is around 8x more cost effective at running 32-bit code.
Further, even on head-to-head TPC-C results, the least expensive Itanic system was only half as good. The Itanic running a non-Linux OS was only 1/7 as good.
Intel is in trouble.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Well, no.
Actually, it was a painful transition. Horrible hacks were required to make it work, and Apple lost considerable market share.
From the user perspective, all the applications that used the FPU stopped working. Worse, the PPC only had (has?) a 64-bit FPU, while the 68K and x86 have 80-bit FPUs. So a simple recompile often wasn't enough. Most of the engineering applications (CAD, EDA) were never ported to the PPC at all. There were unsupported 3rd party FPU emulators for the 68K FPU, but they were really slow, since they had to emulate a wider FPU.
Most of the OS ran in 68K emulation mode for years after the "transition". The PPC interrupt model was mainframe-like, assuming that you didn't do much in an interrupt routine except activate some process. The 68K interrupt model was minicomputer-like, with multiple interrupt levels used as the main locking primitive. Hammering those two together was painful. There were some things you just couldn't do in PPC mode; you had to drop into 68K emulation to prevent interrupts.
The old MacOS had what was euphemistically called "cooperative multiprogramming". That didn't mean you had threads without time-slicing, like a real-time OS. It meant you didn't have real context switching at all. You plugged your code into callbacks at different levels of processing, like "system tasks", "VBI tasks", "timer tasks", "interrupt tasks", etc., none of which could block. No mutexes. No locking. Only interrupt prevention. Trying to do anything in the background was very tough. (I know; I wrote a PPP protocol module for the 68K Mac. I had the only one that could dial the phone in the background without locking up the whole machine, and it wasn't easy.)
Worse, the 68K emulator depended on a jump table with 65536 entries, one for each of the first 16 bits an instruction could have. Early PPCs didn't have enough cache to keep that entire table in the cache all the time. But if it wasn't all in the cache, 68K emulation performance was terrible.
Amusingly, much of the perceived performance advantage of the early PPC machines came from the miserable 68K code generators used on the Mac. The Apple and Zortech compilers were clueless about 68K register allocation, preferring to do all arithmetic in register A0. The PPC code generators were much better. Some high-end apps used to be cross-compiled on Sun 68K machines because the Mac code generators were so bad.
Most of these problems were papered over using the Jobs Reality Distortion Field. But this was the period when Apple started losing market share big-time. Arguably, the PPC transition cost Apple its preeminence.
What Apple really needed was faster 68K CPUs, not a new architecture. Technically, that was quite possible. The Motorola 68060, (never used by Apple, but in the last 68K Amiga), was faster than the PPC of the same vintage. But Jobs had cut a deal with IBM under which IBM was supposed to make MacOS compatible machines (!), and that was the motivation for the PPC.
The way I see it, AMD chips will always be faster than Intel at x86 stuff. And when everyone is changing over, that's CRITICAL.
I think you are right, but not necessarily about what you think. It is "CRITICAL" because it is "The way [you] see it". I believe it is not the speed that is important here, but the perception.
An interesting thought is that the instruction format and register set of AMD's x86-64 is just an extention of x86, so if Intel has a good emulator for x86 running on IA64, then it should be (from a technical standpoint, not a licensing standpoint) fairly trivial to emulate x86-64 at speeds similar to the x86 emulation. THAT doesn't bode well for AMD.
And as for licensing, a clean room implementation should be very easy considering it is simply an extention of x86.
A lot of what you said was very interesting, and probably accurate.
But you made one major error:
Jobs was not at Apple when they made the PPC transition. He was at NeXT.
I remember very clearly reading an interview given by Jobs where he ripped Apple's decision to switch to PPC.
...if they're working with the old DEC stuff (via Compaq via HP), how come they don't dust off the code that they used on the RISC boxes and then Alphas that would do JIT emulation of Vax binaries, and end up saving the resulting RISC binaries back as it hit the code?
Then, they could do the x86->Itanic code conversion rather invisibly and dynamically as the need arose.
You can get it from here. At least I think that's it... I haven't had NT4 running on my alpha in years, and that file's an Installshield self-extracting EXE for NT Alpha, so I can't run it.
But they say this emulator will run faster then using the built-in x86 decoder.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Go back to the first time Greenspan said "irrational exuberance" and start looking there for when the "real" economy started to tank. The stock market dive (again, mid Y2k-ish) was an aftershock of the real problems in the economy. Looking up stock market info would probably be trivial, yet I'm too lazy to do it. Some super-anal Alex P. Keaton could probably quote you all the relevant info, but I'm not that person.
Apple had more market share than IBM in the Apple II days, and it was all downhill after that.
I can only assume you mean Apple had more market share before IBM released the PC. Remember, the computer industry was very small back then compared to today. It took IBM less than a year to eclispe Apple's market share and less than five to establish the standard 95% to 5% ratio that has more or less held since then. The introduction of the Mac and then the LaserWriter blipped those numbers up but were countered later by other missteps. Also, by market share I mean installed base not the quarterly sales figure you are using. One of the problems of talking about Apple's installed base is that number is sometimes smaller than the margin of error of the statistical method used to measure it.
The Itanic always had full 32 bit x86 compatibility and a significant percentage of its die real estate is spent on it. It just sucks so much that it's outperformed by software emulation. Needless to say, if you use the software emulation layer you would *still* be paying for the hardware emulation.
No they're trying to spin this story as if it's actually something good and not a patch for a white elephant.
See this story on The Register
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
For those who don't know (I graduated in '97 and my computer architectures course had no mention of it, so it must be a fairly recent development...) EPIC standards for 'Explicitly Parallel Instruction Code' and basically means (as far as I can tell from a 5 min google) that stuff like instruction reordering for the parallel execution cores is handled by the compiler, rather than the processor (the theory being that the compiler should be better at it).
I think this makes it orthogonal to RISC/CISC/VLIW architecture and I believe Itanium owes the most to RISC, although this isn't explicitly acknowledged anywhere I've found and my theory might be a bit rusty...
but certainly, dynamic recompilation _has_ to beat emulation (except for startup speed). Apart from anything else, the new CPU has more registers to take advantage of so redundant store/load (or push/pop) cycles can be eliminated in the recompilation with a little data flow analysis...