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Itanium Will Only Be Partly Supported by Longhorn
ver.sicher.ungsvergleich writes "Although stopping short of pulling the plug entirely on Itanium, MS has said that Longhorn will only be able to work for a limited number of higher-end jobs. On the positive side, Microsoft does see a future for the chip, but that 'big iron' slot is not exactly what Chipzilla envisioned as Itanium's future."
Haha... I didnt read the fucking article first ;)
I better flame myself before someone else does. This was about "Windows Longhorn Server". Sorry Intel - this must suck big time!
The parent is not quite correct.
The Itanium instruction sets allows code to access between 32 and 128 general registers (aka integer registers), at the discretion of the piece of code, and 128 floating point registers. The sliding window design is for the integer registers 32-127 and can indeed be considered as a sliding window on a memory stack. It is up to each piece of code to decide how many registers it wants to use (in increments of 8 ?).
On top of that there is the ability to design a subset of the high registers (registers with an index higher than 32) as rotating. This makes modulo-pipelining worthwile by removing the requirement for register-to-register moves to push things down the (conceptual) pipeline at each iteration of the loop.